Life at Eclipse

Sunday, May 20th marked my third anniversary as the Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation. My how time flies.

My first inkling that this was going to be a very different job was when the phone rang at home a few days before the announcement went out. Answered by one of my sons, there was the typical yell of “DAAAADDDDD ….PHOOOONNNNNE!!!!” (as only those with teenagers can really appreciate).

I picked up the phone and was met with an amazing basso profundo voice saying “Hello, this is Darryl Taft of eWeek. Can you confirm that you’ve accepted the position of Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation?”

Sheesh. I haven’t even started the job and I’m already saying dumb things like “no comment”. As for Darryl, I guess being deaf in one ear is an occupational hazard 🙂

A couple of hours later, I was sitting on the back deck having a drink with my wife wondering what the heck I had gotten us unto. But it’s been an amazing role, and one which I have thoroughly enjoyed.

A third year anniversary seems like a good opportunity to pause and reflect, so look for some upcoming blog posts on the past, present and future of the Eclipse Foundation. Hopefully I will get at least one of them done before I am gone fishin’ next week.

Monday was a holiday here in Canada, so this morning has been doing the typical post-long-weekend email cleanup, blog reading and so on. Thanks to Bjorn, I came across this little gem: A cynic rips open source.

I always enjoy contrarians, really I do. I’ve even been known to play the role myself upon occasion.

But a real contrarian actually makes an argument based on facts and logic. Unfortunately, the author (Howard Anderson) blows his entire argument in the first salvo:

Open source is not a movement; it’s a religion. It is a set of principles and practices that let everyone share nonexistent or semi-existent intellectual property. Remember the Communist Manifesto: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” It is this generation’s Woodstock.

This is utter nonsense.

Yes, there are many people for whom open source and/or free software is a movement or perhaps, even a religion. (There is certainly some purveyors of orthodoxy to be found in those groups.) But to assert that open source has no basis in business or economics just shows a complete misunderstanding of how the software industry is evolving. For a partial explanation of the business drivers behind Eclipse, take a look at my previous post on Eclipse and innovation networks.

So Bjorn and I just finished our JavaOne talk on Eclipse Europa. Attendance was good, and we had a lot of great questions after the talk.

Last night was the Eclipse party, and I got a chance to catch up with a lot of folks that I hadn’t seen in a while, as well as meet some new Eclipse community members. I took a few pictures, which I’ve posted to Flickr.

Thanks to both Lynn and Ian for organizing the event. It was a great success.

P.S. Any folks interested in watching the Sens-Sabres game, I will be in Jillian’s starting at 4pm. Hope to see you there!

I’ve been on the road for the past week and a half in Germany and Turkey.

Last week was Wiesbaden for Eclipse Forum Europe, plus meetings in Frankfurt and Karlsruhe. EFE is an “embedded” conference, in the sense that it is embedded inside JAX, one of the largest (the largest?) Java conferences in Europe.

Monday the first EclipsIST event was held in Istanbul. The event was a great success, and as Gorkem mentions, Naci Dai and the team at eteration deserve a lot of credit for pulling this event together. It was a great success, and I hope to get invited back again next year.

BTW, Istanbul is a very impressive and photogenic city. My friend and colleague Ralph Mueller recently both purchased identical new cameras and went nuts taking photos.