Life at Eclipse

Philippe recently asked a question which I think deserves a clear answer:

...is the EPL just a joke, that everybody can ignore?

The answer is, of course, no. We take the Eclipse Public License very seriously.

There have been numerous times when we at the Eclipse Foundation been involved in real or potential license violations of the EPL. As the Agreement Steward for the license, protecting the IP which has been licensed under it is one of our responsibilities.

However, we always initially try to rectify these situations privately and discreetly. To date we have had a 100% success rate resolving misunderstandings following this approach. Including the one that Philippe was hinting at. And that’s really the point: in my experience these are typically misunderstandings, not someone attempting to do something malicious.

So yes, we take the EPL very seriously. Yes, we look into potential issues quickly. But we’ve had good luck using the quiet approach and plan to continue doing so.

BTW, if anyone sees a situation where they think there may be a licensing problem, please let us know at license (at) eclipse.org. We will look into it.

I was very intrigued to learn about the European Union Public License today. Having a government-drafted and supported open source license is breaking new ground as far as I know.

I found in particularly interesting that they drafters selected the Eclipse Public License as one of the licenses they will be compatible with. That is a wonderful endorsement of the EPL, and a recognition of Eclipse’s adoption in Europe.

I wonder if the European Commission will be seeking OSI approval?

We are just a few weeks away from our second annual Eclipse Summit Europe event. Last year’s event was an outstanding gathering of the Eclipse community, and I am definitely looking forward to this year’s as well.

ESE is a little bit different from EclipseCon, and in some ways even more ambitious. In addition to keynotes and talks, it also adds in workshops and symposia, which provide an opportunity for conversations, rather than the more typical one-way dialogue you get with a talk. Last year’s symposia were very well received, and I expect even more from this year’s.

With great keynotes from Erich Gamma of IBM and Eclipse fame, and Jörg Sievert from SAP Ventures we have something for both the technical and the business audience.

So, if you haven’t already registered, please do. It’s going to be a great community event.

See you there!

Sitting at home in my pajamas with a fever and a sore throat does not usually put me in an great mood. However, there have been a number of news items this week that really do make for some very good news for the Eclipse community and ecosystem that I wanted to write about.

In no particular order:

1. The Eclipse community kicked ass in the JDJ Reader’s Choice Awards. “Eclipse” or “Eclipse IDE” won five first place awards for Best Java Application, Best Java Debugging Tool, Best Java IDE Environment, Best Java Open Source Product, and Most Innovative Java Product. SWT (the Standard Widget Toolkit) won Best Java Class Library. EMF and WTP were also finalists in several categories.

   But if you dig a little deeper, it gets even better. By my count products based on Eclipse won more five categories and were finalists sixteen more times. Products such as MyEclipse, JBuilder 2007, WebLogic Workshop, Together and Actuate BIRT all did very well in the voting.

   Congratulations to all!

2. I noticed announcements on three brand-new Eclipse-based products this week that look pretty interesting. First, RedHat beta released its RedHat Developer Studio to numerous positive reviews. Second, CodeGear is shipping JGear, which provides Java application performance, visual development, and team collaboration capabilities not part of Eclipse. Third, Motorola released MOTODEV Studio, their development tools for a wide array of Motorola products.

   Obviously, growth in products based on the Eclipse platform continues rapidly. My apologies to any cool new products that I missed.

3. We had three new project proposals this week. I invite you to check out and comment on Abireo [Swing/SWT integration], Open Financial Markets Platform, and Virtual Prototyping Platform.

   I find the Financial Markets proposal particularly intriguing as it is being proposed by a bank and represents a foray by the Eclipse community into a whole new and very interesting world of finance.

4. And last but not least, the Eclipse community model received some nice coverage in blogosphere by Matt Asay and Glynn Moody and in the press by Paul Krill. It’s always nice when someone thinks that Eclipse is open source’s best kept secret.

Not bad for one week, eh?

There’s been a bit of conversation going on between Savio Rodrigues and Angry Bill Burke about the value of trademarks this week. This is rather timely, given the recent update to the Eclipse Foundation Trademark Guidelines and the parallel conversation about “CDT for Windows” going on between Ian Skerrett and Doug Schaefer here at Eclipse.

I have to admit that when I first read Angry Bill’s take on trademarks I thought that he just didn’t get it. On my second read, I realized that he gets it all too well.

You see, trademarks are a control point. One that JBoss use{s|d} to great effect. But as Savio pointed out, what Bill sees as a problem is actually exactly the outcome that communities such as Apache and Eclipse want to achieve. Open source startups and their VC backers want to create barriers to entry, and trademarks are a way to do that. Communities want to lower barriers of entry to projects in order to foster diversity and adoption. Different motivations result in different approaches. Bill wants to make money for his company. We want to make communities that make money for many companies.

In many ways, this is part of the larger conversation on what “open source” means. Open source companies and open source communities both use the term “open source”, but they mean quite radically different things by the term. Even if they all share a common licensing definition, there are quite different development, community and IP processes in play that make them distinct models. We really do need a new lexicon, because this is very confusing to anyone outside the FLOSS cognoscenti.

As the Eclipse Trademark Guidelines state:

The Eclipse Foundation holds the trademarks for the project names and logos on behalf of, and for the benefit of, the Eclipse projects. The individual projects are not separate legal entities and thus not able to hold trademarks individually. The Eclipse Foundation is a legal entity and thus holds the trademarks on behalf of the projects.

Our (somewhat belated) goal is to reduce any possibility of confusion between what is coming from Eclipse and what is coming from a commercial adopter. Or for that matter, an open source fork hosted at another organization.

Angry Bill may think this “sucks”, but it’s how communities foster involvement and participation.