Life at Eclipse

As has already been reported by eWeek, InfoWorld and Linux Watch the Eclipse Foundation is going through the process of joining three different standards organizations: the Java Community Process (JCP), the Object Management Group (OMG) and the OSGi Alliance.

I guess that we should be flattered that Eclipse is newsworthy enough that the articles broke before we even issued the press release. 😀

Our motivations are pretty well documented in the eWeek article. I largely view this as part of Eclipse maturing and playing a more active part in the broader community. Many projects at Eclipse rely on standards from JCP, OMG and OSGi and we believe its simply good behaviour to contribute back by joining. Whether we have the resources available to actively participate will take some time to sort out. But if any committer is interested in representing Eclipse in an expert group, please let us know.

The longstanding relationships with these groups should be well-known by observers of Eclipse, but here are a few examples.

• The Eclipse Web Tools Project (WTP) alone provides tooling and implementations of JSR 244 (JEE 5), JSR 220 (EJB3), JSR 127 (JSF) and others.
• Equinox and OSGi have a very tight relationship, with regular interactions between the expert groups there and committers working on code in Equinox.
• The Eclipse Modeling Project provides implementations for OMG’s UML2, OCL and other specifications

Some of the other organizations we’re working towards joining include the like of ObjectWeb, who has been a member of the Eclipse Foundation since day one. We’ve also been participating in the OpenAjax Alliance for quite a while as well, and I’m honored to say that I was elected to its steering committee.

There are some who are going to view this story through the lense of the historically frosty relationship with Sun, and try to colour this as somehow controversial. But I really don’t see any basis for controversy here. Sun has always acknowledged that Eclipse is part of the larger Java ecosystem, and we’ve always used JCP specifications. It’s simply time to recognize that.

So one last (and somewhat belated) post related to the Eclipse 5th birthday celebrations.

As many of you may already know, over the past month or so we tracked down the 65 or so people who were the original founders of both the Eclipse Project and the Eclipse Consortium and gave each a small gift in recognition of their contributions. If you see someone sporting a black fleece vest with the Eclipse logo and “Founder”, then you can be sure that “they were there”.

A special thanks is owed to Mike Valenta and Bodgan Gheorghe who did the CVS spelunking required to create the list of original committers.

Eclipse has had a wonderful history of growth and community over the past five years. I am looking forward to being part of the next five.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

I have no idea why, but this question has come up in several different emails to the “license at eclipse.org” mail id this week. Maybe it’s because of Sun’s recent announcement that it was releasing Java under the GPL. The question has been asked in several different ways, but the short version is: “my lawyers tell me that the Eclipse Public License is just the same at the GNU Public License. So the EPL is a viral license, right?“

No it’s not.

First of all, what does the term “viral” mean? The Free Software Foundation folks quite justifiably do not like that pejorative term, but many people use it to refer to the provisions in the GPL which require programs that link to GPL code to in turn be distributed under the GPL. That is not true of the EPL, which expressly allows you to distribute your own code combined with EPL code under your own terms and conditions (subject to the limitations of the EPL etc. etc. etc.).

It is true to say that the EPL is a copyleft license, so in that way it is similar to the GPL. But that doesn’t make it “viral”.

It really depends how you evaluate the attributes of the various licenses, and I’ve personally seen many different ways to do this. In some taxonomies, the “copyleft” attribute and the “viral” attribute are separate. In other taxonomies they are combined. It’s likely reasonable to say that the EPL is “copyleft, non-viral”.

But to claim that the EPL is just like the GPL is going over the top. And to claim that the EPL is viral is just wrong, at least when using the common definition of viral.

So congratulations are clearly in order for Simon Phipps, one of my favourite sparring partners. I’m sure that when he started at Sun to open source Java he had no idea what a long and winding road it would be. I definitely applaud his perseverance.

This was certainly a bold move by Sun, and they deserve kudos for their embrace of the GPL, the world’s most popular free software license. I believe that this will do much to kindle new enthusiasm and adoption of Java.

But what really struck me watching the web conference was Sun’s embrace of a permeable, transparent development process across their software engineering organization. I believe that is just as important as the licensing decision. It seems that the entire software industry is taking the best practices from true open source licensing and development and using them to either create new and interesting platforms or reinvigorating existing ones. Open source licensing and community-based development are clearly the direction the industry is moving for its broadly adopted platforms.

So the first half of my prediction was clearly wrong. I’m looking forward to hearing about the governance model that they will implement. They seemed to saying all the right things today, so let’s keep our fingers crossed.

The party at the “P” last night was good fun. In all the years (almost 30) that I’ve been going to the Prescott, I never knew they had a party room upstairs. We’re going to have to find an excuse to use that again.

Here are a few more articles that I’ve seen on the birthday:

• AD Trends
• Alan Zeichick from BZ Media, and
• InternetNews

.