Life at Eclipse

Well, the nominations are up, and 2009 Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors election is shaping up to be the most interesting yet. There are six nominees for Committer Rep and nine nominees for Sustaining Member Rep, each competing for four available seats. My recollection is that is the largest number of people running we have ever had. It’s great to see the interest and commitment!

We have an interesting cross-section of member companies sponsoring the nominees. There are candidates from large companies (Google, IBM, Red Hat, Wind River), small companies (EclipseSource, Ingres, Instantiations, OpenMake, TaskTop, WebTide, ) and independents (Markus Kuppe, Ed Merks). Of special note is the strong contingent of nominees from German companies (Bredex, empolis, Microdoc).

All-in-all, an excellent slate of candidates. I strongly encourage everyone to read their position papers, engage in the conversation and vote!

Today marks the fifth birthday of the Eclipse Foundation. My how time flies when you’re having fun!

It is customary to mark these types of occasions with a bit of an retrospective. My challenge is to try to condense the swirl of activity that is Eclipse into some common themes and significant highlights.

So here goes: the top three things that I am proud of at the Eclipse Foundation over its first five years:

1. Our community. The Eclipse community is a big place, filled with contributors, committers, users, developers and business people alike. Our community has grown dramatically over the past five years and we think the best is yet to come. But what I really enjoy is the gestalt of the Eclipse community. To best understand the sense of collaboration and innovation that permeates Eclipse, I highly recommend joining us at EclipseCon in March. I know I’m biased, but I really believe it to be one of the best developer conferences on the planet.
2. Our technology. Eclipse’s technology has relatively little to do with the Eclipse Foundation per se, since we do not direct the projects or their technical decisions. However, I think that we at the Foundation can claim that we have helped to recruit new projects and new technology innovations to come to Eclipse. (Yesterday’s announcement that Jetty has proposed moving to Eclipse is a recent example.) And that has resulted in a much larger and more diverse collection of cool projects than I think any of us imagined five years ago.
3. Our team. We really do have a great team working here at the Eclipse Foundation. Every single one is committed to and passionate about the Eclipse community, and works darn hard to make it a better place. Oh ya, and we have a lot of fun as well!

It has certainly been an exciting time over the past five years. I look forward to the challenges and excitement of the next five.

I have moved my blogging activities over the the Eclipse blog site. See you over there.

We announced the results of the 2008 board elections earlier today. The turnout this year was a modest improvement over last year. There were 148 committer votes cast, and 29 Add-In Provider votes.

For 2008 there were 5 spots for each class of elected representative. This means that the Add-In Provider reps were voted by acclamation. I would like to welcome:

• Robert Day – LynuxWorks
• Emma McGrattan – Ingres
• Tracy Ragan – OpenMake Software
• Mike Taylor – Instantiations
• Todd Williams – Genuitec

I would also like to recognize the many contributions of Howard Lewis and Eliane Fourgeau and thank them for their service on the Board.

The winners of the committer elections are:

• Chris Aniszczyk
• Doug Gaff
• Mik Kersten
• Jeff McAffer
• Ed Merks

Again, I would like to recognize the many contributions of Konstantin Komissarchik and Darin Swanson and thank them for their service on the Board.

The only difference between men and boys is the price of their toys.

Sound familiar?

Well Denis’ new toys arrived in the mail today. You see, Denis is 100% toy-focused. When he is not riding his snow machine (that Canadian for snowmobile) or his 4-wheeler (Canadian for ATV), Denis like to play with servers. And since he likes things to go fast, he likes his servers fast as well. Preferably lots of them.

Well, thanks to AMD, Denis has four new servers to play with. (One more will be available for viewing at EclipseCon) If they ask really nicely, I bet he will even let Karl and Matt play with them as well.

The webmaster team has lots of great ideas on how to put these new servers to good use. If you are a committer at Eclipse, or a user of our website, this is a good day for you. Stay tuned for better speed, more reliability and improved service.

AMD joins IBM, HP and Intel as companies which have kindly contributed hardware to help us run Eclipse.org. Thanks to all!