Life at Eclipse

We’re getting close to the final countdown for our first release of Phoenix on Nov. 30th. Or, in other words, finally switching the www.eclipse.org home page over to our new look and feel.

The look and content have really come together in the last couple weeks and days. There’s nothing like U.S. Thanksgiving to make a team of Canadians more productive :-). The number of phone calls and emails have been real low this week.

There are still lots of links back to the old L&F/content. Those will take some time to gradually switch over. But IMHO, the new look and organization are a major improvement.

Here is a screen shot of the latest L&F for the home page. I strongly encourage everyone to go kick the tires on Phoenix and let us know your impressions. You can file bug reports here.

We’re currently going through the process of creating an Eclipse Foundation budget for next year. A major part of this process is deciding what programs we want to support.

We would all like to get community feedback on the programs we’re currently thinking about. Better yet, I would love to get some ideas for programs that we haven’t thought about.

So here’s what we’re thinking. For simplicity, I’ve lumped them into two categories: (a) those for the committers and projects and (b) those for the membership and ecosystem. The latter category would be traditionally thought of as “marketing”.

To be clear, there is no way we have the resources to do all of these, so feedback on prioritization would be helpful as well.

The full list of programs is on the Eclipse wiki, so please comment there.

Yesterday I was on a panel at the Open Source Business Conference with Eben Moglen, Diane Peters and Jim Harvie. The title of the session was “GPL 3.0: Directions, Implications, Casualties“, but what it was really about was providing a venue for the Free Software Foundation to talk publicly for the first time about the process that will be followed in creating the next versions of both the GPL and LGPL.

You can read a description of the process that Eben outlined in several articles, such as this one. Unfortunately, I was misquoted as saying that Eclipse would consider moving to GPL 3.0. At this point, I cannot imagine that happening. What I said in response to a question from the audience was that we would consider revisions to the EPL if that meant that we could combine our code with GPL and/or LGPL more easily. But for us to do anything along those lines would require some truly compelling benefits to justify the community work involved.

An obvious question is why was I there? Eclipse doesn’t use the GPL, so how does this impact our community? The fact is that this GPLv3 process is going to be a massive effort with potentially sweeping implications for both the free and open source communities. The FSF has said that as part of their process they want input from other communities, so we plan to be involved. How involved is still TBD.

This effort, along with the work going on at the OSI on license proliferation is going to mean that free and open source licensing issues are going to be a hotly debated topic for the next twelve to eighteen months. As one of the leading open source communities, Eclipse is going to be actively engaged in these conversations. It is going to be interesting to see how all this plays out.

There comes a time in the life of every open source community when they know they’ve made it…that the work they are doing is fundamentally changing the industry and impacting how people look at the development landscape.

So when is that moment? Is it when it hits 50 million downloads? Is it when the projects are given award after award? Is it when hundreds of companies are building products on top of your platform?

Nope.

You really know you’ve made it when Microsoft starts telling the world that it is way more expensive to use your open source tools than it is to buy their products.

Thanks Microsoft! That is just such a nice compliment to the Eclipse projects and its developers.

BTW — If anyone actually has a copy of the MS materials, we’d love to see them. You can reach me at mike at eclipse.org.