Life at Eclipse

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, it’s been three years since I joined the Eclipse Foundation. This is the first installment in a series of blog posts on the past, present and future of the Eclipse Foundation that I plan to write.

Out of curiosity I decided to go back at take a look at the presentation [1] that I gave to the Eclipse Board of Directors at the time. As part of their recruitment process, they wanted each candidate to give a brief talk to outline their interest, agenda and qualifications.

I was actually rather surprised how well the talk has withstood the test of time. Most of the goals and priorities I talked about three years ago seem to be relevant even three years later.

I thought it would be interesting to review a couple of highlights and point out a few things that I got right, and a couple of boners as well. Please let me know what you think. And remember: the points in this presentation were made over three years ago, before I even started working at Eclipse. When you’re looking at the slides, remember to do the Time Warp.

• Towards the end of the presentation I had two slides on what I thought the role of the Executive Director would be, and what values the incumbent would have to bring to the job. I honestly believe they’ve held the test of time, and I will leave it to the readers to tell me how they think I’ve done in meeting those over the past three years. I should mention that what I described as “Business Development” at the time I would now refer to as “Ecosystem Development”. E.g. It is a very large part of the Executive Director’s job to try to drive value and commercial opportunity to the member companies of Eclipse.





• “Eclipse Today” (e.g. Eclipse in 2004): I still think that these points were pretty much spot-on. The most relevant ones were the points about being perceived as IBM controlled and limited marketing presence outside of IBM activities. Later under Short-term Priorities, I mentioned a goal to ““Re-brand” as an independent entity”. To a large degree, that was a very large part of what we accomplished in 2004, leading to the rapid expansion in strategic membership in 2005. Establishing Eclipse as an independent entity took some time and effort. The tipping point was EclipseCon 2005 when BEA, Borland, CA, Sybase and Wind River all joined as strategic developer members.



• There were a few times where I made the point that the the health and vitality of the Eclipse open source project(s) is absolutely key. Although Eclipse is in many ways a trade association or consortium, the source of all value is what happens in the projects. The perfect scenario is where we see a virtuous cycle of growth and investment between the projects and the ecosystem. I believe we’ve made a lot of progress in establishing that. We’ve certainly seen a large growth in the number of organizations contributing code, projects and committers at Eclipse.
• Of course growing the ecosystem was and is an important goal. Our membership has grown to well over 150 companies. Five have joined so far this month!

  Growth in membership is an indicator of the health of the overall ecosystem. But probably even more important is the huge number of products now built on top of Eclipse, with more coming all the time.



• I was mostly wrong when thinking about what I termed as “exploratory” projects for Eclipse.

  I’ve always thought that a sign that RCP was doing well would be someone interested in driving a project to build productivity tools on top of it. Lotus Notes is the first instance of that happening that I’m aware of, and a very impressive one at that. But at the time I was thinking of an open source project and despite a few close calls that has not come to pass.

  Thinking that Mono would be interested in using Eclipse was, in retrospect, naive.



• Up until now at least, I was definitely wrong proposing of system integrators as a potential source of growth. Although they use Eclipse heavily, to date we’ve been unsuccessful in engaging with them to get involved in Eclipse as either members or contributors.

[1] In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I made a few edits to the original presentation. I added “March 2004” to the first slide. I deleted several references to personnel decisions in the interest of privacy. And I deleted one slide which referenced confidential information. Everything else is as it was.

I made the mistake of signing up on LinkedIn a couple of years back because it seemed like an interesting idea with some potential. I was wrong. This site has no value for me whatsoever, and I’ve asked that they close my account.

In about 2.5 years the only times I’ve logged into LinkedIn was to accept the invitations people sent me. The important concept that LinkedIn seems to have forgotten is that if they want people to stay, there actually has to be some value in it for them. And unless you’re an inveterate networker, I just don’t see what the value is. For me at least, social networking is an enabler, not an end in itself.

I also observed an interesting phenomenon: the ratio of invitations I received from people I knew well versus the people who were at best acquaintances was approximately 1:5.

So I apologize to all of you who have sent me invitations or requests for endorsements. I’m outta here.

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!