Life at Eclipse

I think that Gunnar’s posting results from a misunderstanding of the word “branch”. This may be the result of a poor translation in the German article. But I can’t read German so I can’t tell the source of confusion for sure.

Eclipse is not being split up. “Branch” in the context of the the eWeek article is referring to growing new projects into new areas. This is all normal growth, and is consistent with the Roadmap document we published back in March.

There is no new structure being contemplated at the Foundation. We are expecting to continue to recruit new Strategic Members and new projects. A few projects may re-align over time if it makes sense. But we’re definitely not “splitting up”.

I could not have said it better myself. RCP rules!

This week I read two articles which really got me thinking about the value of an agile and community-based development processes.

The first was the fact that roughly six weeks after shipping Eclipse 3.1, Eclipse 3.2 M1 is already available. And it is not just a token release. There are some pretty cool new features available. And this after shipping the fourth Eclipse platform release in a row on time.

The second was an article brought to my attention by the often insightful James Governor. Apparently not only is Visual Studio shipping one year late, but with serious reservations from their own community about the quality of the product.

Does it get any clearer than that?

This does not happen by accident. IMHO, it is by design. Eclipse does it by following a process that you can see described by Wiegand and Gamma at EclipseCon 2005.

Many people attribute this style of development strictly to open source communities, but I actually believe that it can be followed by commercial developers as well. One good example that comes to mind is the JetBrains team that builds IntelliJ. They constantly get high marks for innovation and quality. And they do it by listening to their community.

It is going to be awfully interesting to watch Microsoft over the next twelve months as they try to ship enormous software releases using the processes that have made them successful to date. My fearless prediction is that they are going to be re-thinking how they build software after they survive Vista, Studio 2005, et al.

The inherent value of agile and community-based software development are just becoming too obvious to ignore.

I am back from vacation and dealing with the inevitable mound of emails. Sometimes I wonder if vacations are, in fact, worth the agony of returning to work 😦

The past few months have been fascinating in terms of watching the sudden explosion in Eclipse-focused web portals and news sources. I am likely forgetting a few, but here is a list of what has caught my eye recently:

• As far as I know, the first print magazine dedicated to Eclipse is EclipseMagazin in Germany.
• VA Software — the owners of SourceForge, Slashdot and Freshmeat — have started the Eclipse Techforge, with Philippe Ombredanne writing a great deal of the content.
• BZ Media has rejuvenated the Eclipse Source, and in addition is producing the Eclipse World conference coming up shortly in New York.
• The folks from JavaLobby have started EclipseZone, with well-known Eclipse writer and community member Ed Burnette taking the lead.
• SysCon has started the Eclipse Developers Journal, with long-time Eclipse writer Bill Dudney as Editor-in-Chief.

It is clear that the enormous interest in Eclipse and its community has spurred this growth.

I know that all of these various organizations are looking for writers and content. If anyone out there is interested in contributing articles you certainly have a wide choice of outlets to choose from.

So the Million Download Challenge is officially over as of August 7th. We are currently sitting at 1,000,130