Life at Eclipse

I am back from vacation and dealing with the inevitable mound of emails. Sometimes I wonder if vacations are, in fact, worth the agony of returning to work 😦

The past few months have been fascinating in terms of watching the sudden explosion in Eclipse-focused web portals and news sources. I am likely forgetting a few, but here is a list of what has caught my eye recently:

• As far as I know, the first print magazine dedicated to Eclipse is EclipseMagazin in Germany.
• VA Software — the owners of SourceForge, Slashdot and Freshmeat — have started the Eclipse Techforge, with Philippe Ombredanne writing a great deal of the content.
• BZ Media has rejuvenated the Eclipse Source, and in addition is producing the Eclipse World conference coming up shortly in New York.
• The folks from JavaLobby have started EclipseZone, with well-known Eclipse writer and community member Ed Burnette taking the lead.
• SysCon has started the Eclipse Developers Journal, with long-time Eclipse writer Bill Dudney as Editor-in-Chief.

It is clear that the enormous interest in Eclipse and its community has spurred this growth.

I know that all of these various organizations are looking for writers and content. If anyone out there is interested in contributing articles you certainly have a wide choice of outlets to choose from.

So the Million Download Challenge is officially over as of August 7th. We are currently sitting at 1,000,130

So the Eclipse 3.1 download meter is currently at 994,930. Are there 5,070 people out there who are going to download on a Saturday night? I will check it again at midnight to see which day counts as the end of the challenge.

All you folks out there who pledged, get your checkbooks ready! 😉

As mentioned by Ted Leung, this weekend the OSCON folks have organized the Free/Libre Open Source Software Project Summit. A big “thank you” goes to Allison Randal for all of the work to set this up.

The first day was focused on intros, overviews of organization, governance and funding. It was very interesting to see how many different ways the problems of creating a community and a foundation have been dealt with. Every single foundation is subtly different, and every single one is marked by the history and distinct personality of its community. Perhaps not surprising, but quite striking when you see it all in the same room at the same time.

One of the projects I found particularly interesting was the work done the OSL/OSU and the general buzz around open source in the Portland area. There is a lot of focus from industry, academia and local government to create open source companies and projects in the Portland area. I am going to see what I can do to help create some similar efforts in the Ottawa area when I am not traveling 🙂

I just read a hilarious presentation from ApacheCon Europe entitled Why I Hate the Apache Web Server.

I think that any successful project with some history will have some warts and inconsistencies. I’m sure we have our share.

Anyone out there interested in creating a similar presentation for EclipseCon 2006? If you are, check out the call for particiption. Of course, it will have to be lighthearted, but anyone who can find something as darn funny as using =! rather than != will get a free beer from me 😉