Life at Eclipse

This is sort of “better late than never”, but between traveling to JavaOne and our Foundation staff member meeting last week, I missed Kirill Grouchnikov’s blog posting on who fixed what bugs in Eclipse 3.1.

With regard to the Eclipse projects, IBM still has over half of the committers working on them. (I’ve covered this before here.) So it is neither a secret nor a surprise that they are still carrying the load on many of the projects that were started before the creation of the Foundation. But the interesting data is the trend line on new projects such as BIRT or ECF, where 0% of the committers work for IBM. Kirill’s list of projects was more than a little self serving. It reminds me of the old line about “lies, damn lies and statistics”. For every project within Eclipse that someone can point to which has a lot of IBMers on it, I can point to another which has few or none. What does this prove?

What I don’t understand is why anyone thinks it matters. Eclipse started its life as an IBM project and is evolving into an independent open source community with a diverse group of committers. These are non-controversial facts as far as I’m concerned.

When I talk about Eclipse independence, I am usually thinking of the governance model, where IBM truly set Eclipse free to evolve in the future as an independent entity. The fact that fierce IBM competitors such as BEA, Borland and Computer Associates feel comfortable with the Eclipse governance model to join the board speaks for itself IMO.

Yes, it will take time to evolve the older projects to have more diverse committer populations. But there is no way the Eclipse community wants IBM to slow down its investment in Eclipse. The more the merrier, we say. The goal is to grow the committer community and over time lower IBM’s percentage of a much bigger pie. And new projects like GMF (led by Borland), DSDP (led by Wind River) and DTP (led by Sybase) are moving us quickly in that direction.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Eclipse.org was hammered by a DDOS attack when we posted Eclipse 3.1. You may have noticed that the form of the attack has almost certainly inflated the number of download requests showing in the “Eclipse Download Challenge” counter.

So as described in the “Eclipse 3.1 By the Numbers” article:

The download figure is a click count of download requests at eclipse.org, including downloads served by mirrors. Direct access to mirrors, bit torrent downloads, and other download sharing are not included.

In other words, it is the best number for download requests that we can track with the infrastructure we have.

Theoretically, we could spend a bunch of time and at least approximately determine the number of bogus hits caused by the DDOS attack. But I would personally rather just pay some extra money to my favourite charity.

So I head for SFO in the wee hours of the morning and thought it would be worth jotting down a few thoughts and observations. Here they are in more-or-less random order.

Eclipse was very well represented at JavaOne. For example, it was amazing the degree to which Eclipse showed up in the keynotes:

• In Sun’s keynote by Jonathan Schwartz, Research in Motion provided a demo of an Eclipse-based J2ME toolkit.
• In Oracle’s keynote by Thomas Kurian, Oracle announced its proposals to lead two additional projects at Eclipse: Java Server Faces and BPEL.
• In BEA’s keynote by Mark Carges, Eclipse was highlighted in the tooling demos.
• In Nokia’s keynote by Pertti Korhonen and Jon Bostrom, Eclipse was shown in several different ways. First, as the basis for Nokia’s J2ME tooling. And in what I thought was the demo of the show, they demonstrated creating and deploying a SWT/eSWT application which ran on both a Nokia 9300 and Windows. Very cool.
• And last but not least, IBM’s keynote by Robert Leblanc mentioned Eclipse in several places and demo’d AspectJ and AJDT.

Another interesting note: Bjorn and my talk was in the top ten (#7) for all the sessions on Monday. We probably would have done better if they’d been able to count all of the people they turned away.

One of my personal highlights was quaffing a few ales at the Thirsty Bear. I had heard so many stories about the original Eclipse community gathering there some years back. Eclipse’s presence at JavaOne has certainly come a long way since then. It was great to actually see the place. My personal favourite was the Polar Bear pilsener.

I had a interesting conversation with a fellow who was a huge fan of the Eclipse Web Tools project. He has been using it since WTP M1 to build internet banking applications and is very very happy. Quote: “You have no idea how much I love your tools.” Hats off to WTP!

I met a few of the folks from NetBeans at the show. Seemed like good guys.

The Eclipse passport and t-shirt giveaway in the exhibit floor was a huge success. I think over 500 “I use Eclipse” t-shirts were handed out.

I found it amusing that Eclipse’s booth was in the far back corner of the exhibit hall. Who was in the other extreme back corner? Microsoft. Hilarious.

The only downer note that I’ve had all week at JavaOne was when I read Dan Farber’s blog post where he quoted James Gosling saying “However, modules created for NetBeans won’t be supported in Eclipse. “Where do you draw the line–should we be donating engineers to work on DB2?,” Gosling asked. “IBM is funding Eclipse 100 percent…“.

How very sad to see such nonsense from a community leader.

James, any time you want to chat about how the Eclipse Foundation and its community is supported by its over 100 member organizations, drop me a line at mike at eclipse.org. Or at least read my previous post on Eclipse independence.

I just info from Denis (Eclipse webmaster) that part of the reason the site was slow was that we were hit by a DDOS attack at the same time the 3.1 release went up. Denis has dealt with that and the site is running better now.

Hopefully we can get back to the Million Download Challenge 😉

Here is the summary from Denis:

– Attacks came from about 15 unique IP’s
– Most of those IP’s belong to APNIC (Asia Pacific Network Information Centre)
– Attacks started as early as 10:00pm last night (Eastern)
– All the attacks were rapidly fetching the download clickthru script for a valid 3.1 download file, then aborting the download, thus artificially increasing the 3.1 count and generating useless connections to our site.
– Attacks were halted around 9:00am this morning by me
– Eclipse will be hosting a high-speed mirror within an hour
– website access still slow from the sheer amount of traffic, but usable

Well, Luis beat me to the punch, but Eclipse 3.1 is released and ready to go! We’ve doubled the bandwidth at http://www.eclipse.org, so hopefully the Million Download Challange will make me pay up big time to my favourite charity.

I would really like to thank the platform team for all of the hard work that went into making this release possible. The teams led by John Wiegand, Erich Gamma and Kevin Haaland truly are awesome. When you think of the scale of what they ship, the distributed nature of the team, and the fact that they’ve now hit their dates for four releases in a row it is just absolutely amazing.

Thanks to every committer and contributor who have helped make 3.1 a success!

On a JavaOne note, Bjorn and my talk at JavaOne was a lot of fun. I think this post by Donald Smith of Oracle shows that the interest in Eclipse at JavaOne remains huge.