Life at Eclipse

I am very happy to welcome Google as the newest Strategic Member of the Eclipse Foundation. This is important, and exciting news for the Eclipse community. Google will be joining CA Technologies, IBM, Oracle and SAP as the backbone of the Eclipse Foundation’s funding, as each of these companies are providing $250,000 per year for our operations. They will be joining Actuate, Bredex, EclipseSource, itemis, OBEO, and Talend as Strategic Members on the Board.

Google has long been a very large user, adopter and contributor to Eclipse. The Eclipse tooling platform has been an important part of Android’s success in the mobile marketplace, as well as providing the tooling for other Google initiatives such as AppEngine, GWT, and Dart. Google has also contributed to CDT, and has both led and contributed significantly to the JGit and WindowBuilder projects.  By providing this additional funding, Google will be helping the Eclipse Foundation ensure that we have a great infrastructure and a great staff to support our community.

Please join me in welcoming Google’s generous support of the Eclipse Foundation!

There has been a lot of conversation this past week about the state of Juno’s performance on the new Eclipse 4.2 platform. The original thread was kicked off by Thomas Hallgren, there’s been a flurry of comments on bug 385272, and a nice summary of the concerns in Andrey Loskutov’s blog.

I think it is apparent there are a lot of very valid concerns that will need to be addressed, and we as a community will need to pool our resources to ensure we succeed. However, there are two issues I’d like to address: 1) moving to a major new release is always hard, and 2) we need the community to help solve the problem.

Moving to a new major release

For a little historical perspective, anyone who was around when Eclipse 3.0 shipped in 2004 can likely tell you that moving to a major new release is never ever easy. It is absolutely impossible to do a major rewrite of a platform used by millions without pissing somebody off. Nor is it possible to achieve perfection the first time around. That is not said to dismiss any of the concerns that have been raised. We need to have the feedback, bugs and patches to move things forward. However, we do need to move forward.

My personal summary of where we’re at is that Juno is on 4.2, and it’s far too late to talk about switching the release train back to 3.8. Kepler is going to be based on 4.3. There will never be an Eclipse 3.9. Those decisions were made quite some time ago by the Eclipse PMC and the Planning Council, after long discussions about the pros and cons. That’s where we’re at. So if you want to help move Eclipse forward, please focus your energy on providing input, feedback, patches and tests on the Eclipse 4.x stream because that is unequivocally our future.

Significant community help is required

The performance test were turned off because the Eclipse platform team has a serious resource issue. The simple fact of the matter is that the Eclipse platform team is stretched well beyond what it can reasonably be expected to accomplish. This is not a new problem. It has been discussed in many forums for at least the past three or four years. Unfortunately, very few people or organizations have stepped up to make significant contributions. Perhaps this will serve as a catalyst for people to step forward to contribute more to the needs of the platform. Let me stress how important it is for this to happen.

There have already been a couple of very positive developments that have come out of this conversation. Google has stepped up and donated $20,000 towards the creation of a brand-new testing infrastructure for eclipse.org. A few people and companies have quietly approached us about where they can best put their resources to help. The entire staff of the Eclipse Foundation is going to pitch in to help resolve these issues as much as we can. However, there are thousands of companies and millions of developers that make use of Eclipse every day. We need more of these companies to come forward to start participating in the core Eclipse platform. Google’s contribution is a perfect example.

The Eclipse 4 platform has a large number of important new features and capabilities which are going to allow us to do many more cool things in the future. The Eclipse platform team has done a great job bringing it this far. It is not perfect and we have the SR1 release coming up in a couple of weeks that will address some known performance degradations and memory leaks. I expect we will continue to see more improvements in SR2 and Kepler. The critical issue is that the entire community needs to be part of the solution. Now is the time to step forward and give back to the Eclipse project that started it all.

This morning the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced that Eclipse has been awarded the Software System Award. This is truly a prestigious honour. To put this into perspective, past winners of this award include systems such as Java, Apache, Mosaic, the World Wide Web, Smalltalk, and UNIX.

Awarded to an institution or individual(s) recognized for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both.

The names listed on the award are a who’s who of the original Eclipse development team from IBM who built Eclipse. They are: John Wiegand, Dave Thomson, Gregory Adams, Philippe Mulet, Julian Jones, John Duimovich, and Kevin Haaland; now at Oracle: Stephen Northover; and now at Microsoft: Erich Gamma. Congratulations to all of them for such a well-deserved recognition. But also congratulations to the whole team. Obviously, not every single contributor could be named, but this award is a recognition of what was achieved by all involved.

On a personal note, it is incredibly gratifying to me to see many of my former OTI colleagues recognized for their contributions to the field of computer science and to the industry as a whole. I still believe that OTI was one of the finest software engineering teams ever assembled. The experience of this Eclipse team was legion, with key architects and developers who had worked on systems such as Smalltalk, ENVY/Developer, Convergence, Taligent and VisualAge. This team had worked together successfully for years, and were able to bring all of that experience and wisdom to what became Eclipse.

Eclipse’s contributions to computing are important to recognize. In 1999-2001 when it was built and then released, the notion that you could build a general-purpose tooling platform that was uniformly modular throughout its entire architecture was revolutionary. In many ways, it still is today. The Eclipse plug-in model (later re-hosted on the OSGi standard) has enabled the broadest and most open tooling platform in the world. SWT proved to the world that you could actually build good-looking GUIs in Java in 2001, and compete head-to-head with Visual Studio on the Windows platform.

In terms of its industry impact, it is hard to over-state what Eclipse has accomplished since 2001. First of all, it was an important strategic move by IBM to promote the success of Java by consolidating Java tooling around an open, extensible and professional quality platform – something no other company was willing or capable of doing. Its importance as an endorsement for open source was incredibly valuable. It demonstrated that even large and conservative organizations saw the business value in forging open source platforms and communities. Today IBM includes Eclipse in over 500 shipping products. But Eclipse broke ground in other ways as well. To the best of my knowledge, Eclipse was the first open source project to consciously create an industry consortium and commercial ecosystem around an open source platform. We now take this model for granted, and new organizations such as OpenStack consciously emulate it. But it was ground-breaking at the time, and a key part of the industry-wide success of Eclipse.

With the exception of John Duimovich, none of the original team mentioned in the award are still directly involved in Eclipse. (And even John’s involvement as the Tools PMC leader is limited.) But Eclipse remains successful, vibrant and innovative. It is truly an industry-wide platform that is relied upon in diverse areas such as enterprise development, embedded software development, mobile and modeling. The original visionaries were the pioneers who launched Eclipse in 2001. Today, we have a community of over a thousand committers supported by over a hundred companies moving Eclipse forward, and that is truly a testament to the foundation laid by the team in 2001.

Voting for the Eclipse Foundation’s 2012 Board of Directors is now open. If you are eligible to vote, you should soon be receiving an email with your voting credentials. If you believe you are eligible, but do not receive credentials, please contact webmaster@eclipse.org.

Many thanks to the candidates who put their names forward for the positions available. There are a total of six elected positions available: three for the Committer representatives, and three for the Sustaining Member representatives. I know I say this every year, but these representatives are important! So if you are eligible to vote, please do so. Voting is open until 3:00pm Eastern on March 16, 2012.

The winners of the election will be announced at the Annual General Meeting of the Eclipse Foundation which will be held on Monday, March 26th at EclipseCon 2012.