Life at Eclipse

So one of the very common rants around the office here at the Eclipse Foundation is Denis (aka Webmaster) saying “…there you guys go again with that Smalltalk this, Smalltalk that stuff! Arrggghhhhh!” He regularly mocks us that every lunch conversation will hit upon Smalltalk within 10 minutes, no matter what topic the conversation starts from. If you think I’m making this up, just ask him.

You see, it turns out that many of us in the Eclipse world in general and at the Eclipse Foundation in particular have backgrounds in Smalltalk. I was one of the original guys who worked on ENVY/Developer, Ian Skerrett was our first ever ENVY marketing guy, Skip McGaughey was instrumental in getting IBM interested in Smalltalk, Donald Smith and Wayne Beaton taught it, Bjorn Freeman-Benson and Ward Cunningham were (are?) world-famous Smalltalkers.

But the real point is: Dear Denis, please read this, a post I found via John Duimovich’s blog.

Yes, we are Old Dudes Who Know Smalltalk. Listen and learn! 🙂

Check out this IDE straw poll on tezaa. Although it is admittedly unscientific, I’m pretty amazed to see Eclipse out ahead of Visual Studio. Neat.

P.S. Anyone wanna take a bet on how long it takes the Sun guys to astroturf this? 😀

I read with a great deal of interest the Microsoft Open Specification Promise. It was particularly interesting to read the community feedback and realize that Microsoft has been consciously and conscientiously working with the open source community to develop this document. That’s an important step forward for them, as it demonstrates they believe the open source community is now integral to the broad adoption of technologies they care about.

There has long been a question as to whether Microsoft would someday use its patent portfolio to attack the open source community. Although this document is not perfect, and I’m guessing some will push hard for even broader promises, it is a clear indication that at least in the WS-* space that Microsoft is committed to enabling open source implementations of this technology without fear of a patent lawsuit from them. And that is clearly a positive step.

This is also an important development for Eclipse’s Higgins project which is leading the way in identity management. I know that the team has been working with Microsoft to help make this development come about. Congratulations on this development.

EclipseWorld has come and gone, and now it it’s time to start thinking about the next Eclipse event: Eclipse Summit Europe (ESE). We are expecting that this will be a great opportunity for networking and making new contacts within the Eclipse ecosystem, as there will be many visitors that haven’t been to other Eclipse events such as EclipseWorld and EclipseCon.

We would all really like to give a big “thank you” to our sponsors. Their response has truly been overwhelming. Twenty companies have signed up to support the event, which is a wonderful benchmark considering it is our first one in Europe.

I am personally looking forward to attending ESE as the event is organized to be quite different than EclipseCon. The symposium style of conference should make for some interesting learning experiences for everyone involved. (For those who haven’t looked, there will be symposiums covering server-side Eclipse, RCP, test driven development for embedded, and modeling.) In addition, there will be lots of interesting progam content on both mainstream and new and noteworthy projects.

Help spread the word about ESE by becoming a friend of the event.