Life at Eclipse

Probably very few people know this, but when I first heard of the idea of doing what has become known as Callisto, I hated the idea. In fact, I attempted an ultimately unsuccessful argument against it. There were various reasons for this, but chief amongst them was that I didn’t think it would succeed.

I was wrong.

Callisto has already been a major success for the Eclipse community. Shipping 10 projects on the same day is no small feat. Everyone who worked on making Callisto a reality deserves a huge round of applause for a job well done. And I need to make this really clear: the idea did not come from the Foundation, and the credit for its success is clearly due to the projects and committers that came together to make it happen. In particular, I would like to single out David Williams from the Web Tools Platform PMC who put a lot of time and effort into the peer leadership required to make Callisto a success.

That said, I think that the real impact of Callisto is yet to come. That’s because cultural change always occurs slowly, and it is the cultural impact of doing annual release trains which I think will be the most impressive over time.

The first major cultural impact will be on the committer community and the project development process within Eclipse. Don’t forget that the release train idea was a bottoms-up phenomenon and that participation in each train is voluntary. Each project decides to join on their own. But the interesting side-effect is that more projects want to join the release train. It’s like a rite of passage: being capable of participating in the release train will come to mean that a project has grown up sufficiently to become a fully mature pr oject within Eclipse. This year, the Callisto projects had a 9-item list of requirements to participate (see the Callisto page under “Requirements”). I’m predicting that next year will have a longer list. But working with a common set of requirements and expectations will have a profound effect on all of the projects on Eclipse as they grow and mature. Most tangibly, this is a process by which the original Eclipse project can instill in the newer Eclipse projects some elements of the Eclipse Way. Not by coercion or by preaching, but by leadership within a group whose membership is purely voluntary. I predict that this will have a profoundly positive impact on Eclipse by creating a more cohesive committer community over time.

The second major cultural impact will be on the technology consumers who use Eclipse. For years the software industry has been conditioned to accept and to even expect failure. Microsoft is a particularly hapless victim of this, to the degree that it has even spawned a cottage industry around explaining the Broken Windows Theory. Contrast that with the fact that for now three years in a row, the Eclipse project has shipped on June 28 [1]. And now with the release train, 9 additional Eclipse projects are shipping on the same day. I believe that this degree of predictability will have a profoundly positive impact on the Eclipse ecosystem, as consumers (a) build their plans with a high degree of confidence that their underlying technology will be available on schedule and (b) aspire to build development plans which have the same degree of predictability.

I really don’t think that any of this happened by accident. Accordingly, I would like to recognize the efforts of John Wiegand, Kevin Haaland and John Kellerman who persevered in overcoming my original objections to doing Callisto. Eclipse is a better place because of their foresight.

I am sure that others can think of additional cultural implications that annual release trains may have on the Eclipse community. Comment away!

[1] This year, the projects are going to be done Callisto on June 28, but the Foundation needs 48 hours to ensure that the mirrors have been populated before turning on the download taps. You can start downloading Eclipse 3.2 and the rest of Callisto on June 30.

Motorola announced this morning that they have joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer and has proposed a new project focused on tools for mobile Linux. This is to complement the initiative they announced last week around mobile Linux.

We’ve been working towards this for some months now, and we’re obviously very pleased and excited to have Motorola join the Eclipse community in such a meaningful way.

Edit note: Added link to the project proposal and changed the sentence’s tense from future to past.

I’ve been meaning to blog on this for what feels like forever. I’m glad to finally have a moment to write this up.

Back on April 21st, I was one of a number of presenters at an event here in Ottawa put together by the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation (OCRI) on Competing With Open Source Software. By far and away, my favourite presentation was from Peter Carbone, the Acting CTO of Nortel. He focused on a maturity model for open source adoption that was developed by researchers at my alma mater Carleton University with support and involvement from Nortel.

The maturity model really resonated with me. It felt exactly right, given the experiences I’ve had here at Eclipse.

The six stages of maturity identified were:

• Stage 0: Denial – open source has no value, or we’re not using it.
• Stage 1: Use – passive use of FLOSS.
• Stage 2: Collaboration – contribute code and/or resources.
• Stage 3: Champion – executive support, project leadership.
• Stage 4: Strategic – defined business model based on FLOSS, and drive projects to achieve business goals.
• Stage 5: Aggressive – design products so that they can be based on FLOSS, obtain competitive advantage by harnessing changes in multiple ecosystems.

Within the Eclipse ecosystem we can see companies at every stage of this maturity model. We’re constantly working with organizations who are interested in getting to the next level of maturity.

In addition to the maturity model itself, I felt that this statement under success factors is particularly applicable to Eclipse: “Ability to appropriate co-created value is more important than lowering costs“. I think that statement really defines what brings so many companies to participate in Eclipse projects, where they can collaborate on the platform and then compete with the products they build on top.

I would be really interested in hearing comments on this maturity model and presentation. Like I said, I felt it was very good and really captured what we’re experiencing at Eclipse. Has anyone seen another maturity model that they feel is superior to this?

Like Steve O’Grady, fishing for me has never been about just catching fish. In fact, if we do manage to catch fish, that’s just the icing on the cake. Enjoying the scenery and some good times are the primary motivations. And although the scenery where we were cannot compare with what Steve enjoys in Colorado, it’s not too shabby either.

For the last ten years I’ve been doing an annual trip with John Duimovich and Jon Eschinger. The last two years have been to Nemio, a fantastic walleye and pike spot on the Gouin Reservoir in Northern Quebec. It’s about a seven hour drive from Ottawa, with at least 4 1/2 hours of that on gravel roads. I highly recommend Nemio Outfitters as one of the most hospitable and best run fishing camps we’ve been to.

This year the fishing was medium. There were tons of fish showing on the finder, but for the first couple of days they were just not biting. It happens. Fortunately, the last day we were there the walleye were on and I was able to bring back a couple of nice fillets for the kids to enjoy.

One of the nicest things about a trip like this is that you can completely unwind in a short vacation. The bad news is returning to the office to the accumulated emails. Nothing tells you vacation is over quite like watching 1300 emails arrive 😦

So we had a very interesting milestone at Eclipse yesterday. Our first ever committer from Sun committed code to CVS. Suresh Raju contributed code to get Eclipse working on Solaris x86. Welcome Suresh!

We were first introduced to the Solaris x86 team by Simon Phipps, who runs open source strategy over at Sun.

When you think of it, this just makes really good sense. The Solaris x86 team is working to enable one of the most popular development tools for its platform. As they should.

I am very happy to see that sound business decisions are replacing rhetoric in the relationship between Sun and Eclipse. This is a small step forward, but it is a very tangible and pragmatic one.

For those who enjoy the never-ending Swing vs. SWT debate, the amusing thing is that the component the Suresh has commit rights to is org.eclipse.swt.gtk.solaris.x86. The title of this post says the rest 😉