Life at Eclipse

Anyone interested in my previous comments regarding the Higgins announcement should also read Bob Sutor’s post that so eloquently lays to rest much of the hyperbole concerning this announcement.

No, I am not talking about one of my all-time favourite B movies. I’m talking about the Higgins announcement today. (Higgins being both a project at Eclipse and a Tasmanian long-tailed mouse.)

In the press release, IBM, Novell and Parity Communications announced support for the Eclipse Higgins project. The announcement was widely covered by both the press and the blogs.

If Parity Communications rings a bell, that’s because it’s the name of Paul Trevithick’s company, Paul being Higgins’ project leader. Paul, John Clippinger and Mary Ruddy are the founders of the SocialPhysics project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Higgins is the implementation of many of the ideas being worked on there.

The goals of of the project are ambitious. From the proposal:

The Higgins Trust Framework platform intends to address four challenges: the lack of common interfaces to identity/networking systems, the need for interoperability, the need to manage multiple contexts, and the need to respond to regulatory, public or customer pressure to implement solutions based on trusted infrastructure that offers security and privacy.

Higgins is definitely one of the truly innovative and interesting projects going on at Eclipse. I’m very happy to see the additional backing of IBM and Novell behind the project. It’s great news for them and for Eclipse.

If you’re interested in learning more about the project or contributing, here is the project newsgroup.

Check this out. The publishers of EclipseMagazin in Germany have created a 20,000 euro award program for “Outstanding European Contributions on Java and Eclipse“. Very exciting!

This week both Donald and I are at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC West). Steve O’Grady already blogged on his impressions of yesterday’s events.

For those that have never been to an OSBC, it is a fairly unique show. There are basically equal numbers of lawyers, venture capitalists, software entrepreneurs and technology consumers. With a few token adventurers from the larger open source communities thrown in for good measure. My only criticism of the event, which I also plan to make in the panel I’m on this afternoon is that with all the talk about open source business models, the one that seems to get ignored at this event is probably the biggest one of them all: namely, those companies that make a business out of commercially adopting open source technologies from the larger communities such as Apache and Eclipse. The focus here seems to be entirely on those start-up firms that are building single community open source projects/products like SleepyCat, SugarCRM, MySQL, etc. Not that they don’t deserve the attention, but I don’t think that they represent the only “open source business” model out there.

I am curious to hear from companies out there in the Eclipse ecosystem as to why they decide not to participate at OSBC. I don’t mean necessarily as exhibitors, because the lack of developers here makes that pretty obvious. But there are clearly some interesting and successful businesses being built on top of the Eclipse technology whose stories are not being told here. Why not?

Both my wife and my mother would agree that I am terrible with this stuff. I meant to post this on the date, really I did!

February 2, 2004 is the date we use as the birthday for the independently governed Eclipse Foundation, as that’s the date it was officially announced at the first EclipseCon.

It has certainly been a busy two years!

Note: Republished to fix the typo in the date.