Life at Eclipse

There comes a time in the life of every open source community when they know they’ve made it…that the work they are doing is fundamentally changing the industry and impacting how people look at the development landscape.

So when is that moment? Is it when it hits 50 million downloads? Is it when the projects are given award after award? Is it when hundreds of companies are building products on top of your platform?

Nope.

You really know you’ve made it when Microsoft starts telling the world that it is way more expensive to use your open source tools than it is to buy their products.

Thanks Microsoft! That is just such a nice compliment to the Eclipse projects and its developers.

BTW — If anyone actually has a copy of the MS materials, we’d love to see them. You can reach me at mike at eclipse.org.

So I am currently at the Hyatt Regency Burlingame — fondly remembered as the site of our most recent EclipseCon — for the Zend/PHP conference. This is my third conference in eight days. London, Paris and San Francisco in eight days. Remind me to never do that again.

But the great thing is that no matter where I go, Eclipse is present in a big way.

• At the Symbian Smartphone show, Symbian and Nokia both made Eclipse-related announcements. Symbian announced that they were joining the Foundation, and that they will be making a significant on-going contribution to the C/C++ Development Tools (CDT) project.

  Nokia announced its new Carbide product family of C/C++ development tools, based on CDT. This is Nokia’s foray into Eclipse-based C/C++ tools to complement their previously announced efforts in mobile Java (J2ME).

  Also at the show, I got a demo of Wirelexsoft‘s visual programming tools for mobile applications. It is amazing to me what a small dedicated team can build on top of Eclipse in short order. This tool looks really powerful.

• Next stop was the OSGi World Congress where I was on a panel and gave a keynote. This was a smaller, more intimate conference. Lots of time and space to chat with people. A few notables I had an opportunity to meet were Richard Hall and Enrique Rodriguez from the Felix project, and Christer Larsson from Knoplerfish (thanks for the T-shirt!)

  Here, the Eclipse Foundation got to do its own announce that we’re ready with OSGi R4, and that the Equinox project was being “promoted” to become part of the Eclipse project. The Eclipse runtime is entirely based on the OSGi spec. I consider the OSGi and Eclipse relationship a great example of open source and open standards working well together. Although there is strong competition between multiple open source and commercial implementations, I really found the OSGi community open and friendly to a relative newcomer.

• Today’s stop is at the Zend/PHP conference, where Zend announced that they are joining Eclipse as a Strategic Developer. They are going to be leading a project to implement PHP development tools at Eclipse. I think I said in my first press interview upon joining Eclipse that this community is about more languages and platforms than Java. Having Zend come to build PHP tools at Eclipse is a big step in that direction.

After a redeye home this evening, I don’t travel for almost ten days 😉

My goodness Ed Burnette is fast 🙂 .

Yes, as mentioned by Ed, I really am very pleased that Ward has decided to join the staff of the Eclipse Foundation. It’s really great to have him. I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with Ward at several points in the past, and I’ve always found him to be a truly rare bird: someone who is both brilliant but also blessed with a warm and engaging personality. I couldn’t imagine someone I would rather be working with.

For those who are interested, here is the text of the email I sent to the Eclipse committer community earlier today:

I am very pleased to announce that Ward Cunningham is joining the staff of the Eclipse Foundation.

To date, the efforts of the Eclipse Foundation in support of the committer community have been primarily around providing infrastructure and process. However, a high functioning committer community is about more than just sharing servers and following a common process. A high functioning committer community is about collaboration and cooperation between the project silos. Although the Councils do an admirable job of co-ordinating the activities of the many Eclipse projects, what is needed is a culture of collaboration and cooperation. This is especially true today, as Eclipse grows rapidly with new projects and new committers.

To help cultivate this committer culture, I am pleased to announce that Ward Cunningham is joining the Eclipse Foundation as Director, Committer Community Development. Ward’s track record of invention in areas such as wikis, patterns and agile development are known worldwide. His current interests in open source and developing communities of developers are a perfect match for the work we need to do at Eclipse. Ward will lead the effort to create a more cohesive Eclipse committer community by working with developers in order to enhance Eclipse as “the place to be”.

The past two days have been both busy and exciting. Today was the Eclipse Members meeting. Yesterday I was in the Board meeting while Ian Skerrett and Skip McGaughey were leading the new members meeting and the Eclipse marketing symposium.

The marketing symposium was definitely a big hit with the members. We had Carl Zetie from Forrester and Steve O’Grady from RedMonk speaking. (I would have liked to have given a link to Carl, but apparently you have to be a Forrester customer to read Carl’s blog. How lame is that? I hope that Carl can drag that company out of the ’90’s soon.)

Steve’s talk on marketing to developers was a big hit. His message? Developers matter, and you cannot market to them using conventional marketing blah blah blah. Top down will never work (if it ever did), so you have to learn how to create a market bottom up. Steve’s presentation materials are available here (OpenOffice) and here (PowerPoint). They are available under a Creative Commons license and I highly recommend them.

Along the same lines, I also really enjoyed reading You ARE a Marketer. Deal With It.

If you’re interested in creating passionate users, or keeping your job, or breathing life into a startup, or getting others to contribute to your open source project, or getting your significant other to agree to the vacation you want to go on… congratulations. You’re in marketing.

The message here is that we are all becoming marketers. Every one of us in Eclipse — developers and committers definitely included — have the opportunity to get the message out. To have conversations with our community. Both Kim and Steve get it.

For those who read the entire “You ARE a Marketer…” and are wondering….Yes, I sent the link to Ian……and no, he refuses to kill himself 😉

I’ve been trying to find the time to write this posting ever since I got back from EclipseWorld. Obviously, in this job I get to see a lot of demos of tools built with Eclipse. A lot of them are pretty cool. Everyone once in a while I see something that just blows my socks off.

At EclipseWorld, I ran into an old acquaintance of mine, Neeraj Sangal. Neeraj and I crossed paths briefly at WebGain, after we were both acquired by that ill-destined company. Neeraj is a serial entrepreneur, and was the brains behind StructureBuilder.

Neeraj’s latest firm Lattix has built a software complexity analysis tool that is really interesting.

The first thing I think is interesting about their technology is that it is based on an idea borrowed from a domain other than software. In Neeraj’s own words:

DSMs (Dependency Structure Matrix) were invented in the 70s. However, their use was really popularized by MIT Sloan School during the 90s when they were applied at a number of large companies such as Intel and Boeing to analyze their complex work flows and organizations. Our extension of DSMs to software architectures is called Dependency Models…

There certainly are precedents for interesting ideas being pulled into software development from other sources. For example, design patterns were originally inspired by Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language, which “…was originally expected to enable every citizen to design and construct their own home”(1).

The second cool feature is that tool provides is an easy to understand way to analyze your system’s architecture, and to determine where your architectural “leaks” are. (Where code has (ab)used internal APIs, for example.)

Bjorn is going to look into whether we could use the tool to look into some pieces of Eclipse itself . Which I am sure will find nothing but perfection 🙂