Life at Eclipse

So the staff of your friendly neighbourhood Eclipse Foundation honoured U.S. Thanksgiving last week with an afternoon of bowling. (That would be 5-pin to those not from Canada.) It was sort of like an Eclipse DemoCamp for the athletically challenged.

Apparently my misspent youth was worth something after all. I wasted quite a bit of time in my early teens hanging out at Hampton Lanes in the west end of Ottawa bowling, playing pinball and Pong, and eating quite possibly the greasiest onion rings in the history of man.

But it all came to a great result when yours truly won the combined high score award: a broken down, second hand bowling trophy that Lynn found on eBay and covered with Eclipse stickers. Now proudly displayed in my office, ready to be challenged for again next year.

Thanks go to Lynn and Sharon for organizing a fun afternoon!

…EclipseCon 2008 Program Committee.

I spent a couple of hours yesterday looking through the EclipseCon talk submissions, and I would definitely not want to be in charge of selecting talks. There are simply too many good ones. An embarrassment of riches. A cornucopia of technical info.

230 long talk submissions
134 short talk submissions
108 tutorial submissions
17 Philippe Ombredanne proposals 🙂

Wow! Even allowing for some dups and some withdrawals, that is great showing by the Eclipse community. Thanks to everyone who took the time to provide a submission.

Although the quantity is impressive, the quality is even more so. I encourage you to take a look (and comment) for yourself, but right now I am very confident that EclipseCon 2008 is going to simply rock as a technical conference.

I hope to see you there!

So according to the website, Eclipse was elected as a representative on the Java Community Process SE/EE Executive Committee. Even better, it looks like we did quite well in the voting. There is certainly no shame in getting beaten by Google 🙂

I’m looking forward to participating on the EC. Like I said before, the future success of Eclipse is intimately tied to a vibrant, open and successful Java. I am sure that there will be no shortage of interesting topics to discuss over the next three years.

So thanks to all of those who voted for Eclipse. It was much appreciated. I hope we do the Java Community proud.

Morning cup of Tim Horton’s coffee: $1.05
Tuna sandwich for lunch: $4.50
Listening to Donald giggle like a school girl when describing the Android SDK using Eclipse: priceless

One of the interesting phenomena about working at the Eclipse Foundation is the intelligence and strategy attributed to us. Take for example David Berlind:

For Sun, perhaps the big win will be on the developer tool front where, whatever Google comes up with, all Sun will have to do is retool the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment to support it. And clearly Sun is doing that. But so too will NetBean’s nemesis; the Eclipse Foundation (you knowwwwww that Eclipse won’t sit this one out). Meanwhile, regardless of what Sun does with NetBeans to support Google’s mobile Java initiatives, I’m sure the developer community would appreciate a reconciliation of the license situation. Sooner or later, that situation will come to a head.

While the common assumption is that Eclipse adoption happens because of incessant background conversations between the Eclipse Foundation and industry players, the fact of the matter is that at least half of the decisions are made without ever talking to us. Eclipse adoption is massively beyond the point where our small team at the Eclipse Foundation can direct it. So although David is correct that the Eclipse Foundation is not going to sit this one out, the decision wasn’t made or even influenced by us. Instead, it was made by Google. Without our knowledge. We were just as excited as everyone else to find out that the Android SDK was shipped with a plug-in for the Eclipse SDK.

And that is the key point: an open platform is one which people adopt because it is in their own best interests to adopt it. The developers working on Android made the call on their own, and not because of any talents of persuasion we may have at the Eclipse Foundation.

So to reinforce a point I made last week: at an open community adoption happens organically. Gated communities have their CEO’s announce future plans.

Open governance leads to open communities which leads to open platforms which leads to open adoption. Hmmmm maybe we’re onto something here at Eclipse?