Life at Eclipse

I finally have a moment — and the picture thanks to John — to mention this truly comic moment in Beijing. As John Kellerman and I were doing our lightning tour of the Forbidden City, this class of girls came up and asked to get their picture taken with us. Near as we could figure out, they were from a small city in the interior of China and we were amongst the first foreigners they’d met. It was very near Chinese Lunar New Year when we were there last week, and many schools were doing tours during the holiday break.

The smiles on everyone’s face say it all.

I’ve been noticing an interesting trend in the worldwide ecosystem growth of Eclipse. No longer content with just focusing on software and developer tools, the Eclipse community has begun to branch out into new areas. Among them: UK-based courier services and Canary Island real estate. As evidence, take a look at these photos taken by alert Eclipse fans in their travels. Don’t the logos look familiar?

My guess is that these companies thought “Eclipse” was a good name and did a quick internet search for artwork. Googling “eclipse artwork” brings you directly to our artwork page, which has a full collection of high-quality vector artwork for the Eclipse logos available under the EPL. So the community that started with a vision of plug-in re-use has spawned a whole new genre: logo re-use.

Too funny.

Oh, and by the way, one of the best business books I’ve read in the past year has been Wipperfurth’s Brand Hijack. I highly recommend it.

I’m heading to the airport soon, and wanted to blog about the week before leaving.

I’ve been in Bejing this week for the first annual Eclipse Day in China. This event was hosted by Tsinghua University, the premier technical university in China. (Sometimes referred to as the “MIT of China”.)

The Eclipse Day was sponsored by Actuate, HP, IBM and Sybase, all strategic members of Eclipse.

Here’s a little known fact: between Actuate and Sybase, there are around 50 Eclipse committers located in Shanghai, which I believe makes China the third largest country in terms of Eclipse committers. (US and Canada being #1 and #2 respectively.)

The Eclipse Day was a huge success. We were trying to be conservative as it was our first event in China and planned for 100 to 140 attendees. By lunchtime, 230 attendees had registered. Apparently, there are a lot of organizations using Eclipse in China. There were attendees who had used just about every one of the major Eclipse projects, and the RCP session was packed.

This is my first trip to China, and it has been a wonderful experience. Sitting beside me on the flight from Vancouver was Maurice Strong who has been coming to Bejing regularly for 40 years. He told me to expect to be surprised, and I was. I’ve never seen hyper-modern so closely juxtaposed with the ancient.

Here’s a picture of John Kellerman of IBM and I playing the tourist on the Great Wall of China.

As already referenced by Bjorn and Ward, this article by John Mark Walters makes for some very interesting reading. I highly recommend it, and I am already looking forward to reading the next one in his series.

The article has some interesting implications for Eclipse. I would venture to say that Eclipse stands out as an example of an open source community that has been very successful without being overtly religious or ideological about its motives. If anything, the mantra within the Eclipse community seems to be a pragmatic desire to help developers successfully adopt its technology. As such, John Mark’s article provides an interesting and plausible explanation for Eclipse’s success.