Life at Eclipse

We’ve had two new people start working at the Eclipse Foundation this week.

First is Matt Ward, who in Denis’ words, has “…joined the ranks of co-webmaster/sysadmin/person_to_blame at the Foundation…. Matt comes to us with strong UNIX skills, a great attitude and an impressive beard.” I can definitely vouch for the great attitude and the beard.

Also starting today is Wayne Beaton who is our new Eclipse Evangelist. Wayne is joining the Foundation from IBM, where he was a WebSphere Migration specialist. I worked with him back at The Object People, where Wayne was the first employee and Director of Curriculum. He has years of experience explaining technology to people. Wayne has also worked at BEA in the past and has been using Eclipse pretty much since its initial release.

Please give a warm welcome to Matt and Wayne!

BTW, this now make nine full-time staff at the Eclipse Foundation. For those of you who are interested, here is the list (in order of start date):

• Mike Milinkovich – Executive Director
• Skip McGaughey – Director, Eclipse Ecosystem
• Sharon Wolfe – Office Manager
• Ian Skerrett – Director, Marketing
• Denis Roy – Manager, IT (webmaster)
• Bjorn Freeman-Benson – Technical Director, Open Source Process and Infrastructure
• Janet Campbell – Manager, Intellectual Property
• Matt Ward – Linux Systems Administrator
• Wayne Beaton – Eclipse Evangelist

We’re now up to three people on staff who at one point in their career hacked Smalltalk for a living. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess which three 😉

Just back from EclipseWorld in New York. I think BZ Media did a great job putting together the first Eclipse-specific conference in North America other than EclipseCon. (In Europe, iX has been running for two years.) The program was interesting and the turnout exceeded their expectations. For me, a big part of the attraction was to talk to Eclipse users and vendors. Of course it was also an opportunity to chat with the project leaders and committers that came to the event as well.

I will definitely be back next year in Boston. Mark September 6-8 down on your calendars now.

After all, it’s always important to have a steady stream of Eclipse events that Microsoft can send people to 😉

I think that Gunnar’s posting results from a misunderstanding of the word “branch”. This may be the result of a poor translation in the German article. But I can’t read German so I can’t tell the source of confusion for sure.

Eclipse is not being split up. “Branch” in the context of the the eWeek article is referring to growing new projects into new areas. This is all normal growth, and is consistent with the Roadmap document we published back in March.

There is no new structure being contemplated at the Foundation. We are expecting to continue to recruit new Strategic Members and new projects. A few projects may re-align over time if it makes sense. But we’re definitely not “splitting up”.

I could not have said it better myself. RCP rules!

This week I read two articles which really got me thinking about the value of an agile and community-based development processes.

The first was the fact that roughly six weeks after shipping Eclipse 3.1, Eclipse 3.2 M1 is already available. And it is not just a token release. There are some pretty cool new features available. And this after shipping the fourth Eclipse platform release in a row on time.

The second was an article brought to my attention by the often insightful James Governor. Apparently not only is Visual Studio shipping one year late, but with serious reservations from their own community about the quality of the product.

Does it get any clearer than that?

This does not happen by accident. IMHO, it is by design. Eclipse does it by following a process that you can see described by Wiegand and Gamma at EclipseCon 2005.

Many people attribute this style of development strictly to open source communities, but I actually believe that it can be followed by commercial developers as well. One good example that comes to mind is the JetBrains team that builds IntelliJ. They constantly get high marks for innovation and quality. And they do it by listening to their community.

It is going to be awfully interesting to watch Microsoft over the next twelve months as they try to ship enormous software releases using the processes that have made them successful to date. My fearless prediction is that they are going to be re-thinking how they build software after they survive Vista, Studio 2005, et al.

The inherent value of agile and community-based software development are just becoming too obvious to ignore.