Life at Eclipse

Next week is our first-ever Eclipse Board of Directors meeting outside of the USA. Berlin is our destination, primarily based on the fact that it is a darn cool city.

Although Ralph won’t be able to join us, we are going to carry on the tradition he has created and have an Eclipse Stammtisch while we’re there. So Tuesday, June 16th is an opportunity for you to have a beer with the leaders of the Eclipse community.

If you can make it, please add your name to our Doodle poll. We’re hosting it at the Bavarium. Thanks to Eike Stepper for finding us a place on short notice.

We hope you can join us!

Today is a bit of a milestone for me, as it is exactly five years since I assumed the role of Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation.

I had an inkling that this was going to be a different kind of role when a few days before I even started a journalist by the name of Darryl Taft called my home to ask me if it was true I was taking the job. Being totally caught off guard, I think I said something dumb like “no comment”. Not an auspicious beginning for a very public position.

It is hard to over-state the early challenges we had getting the Eclipse Foundation up and running. Five years ago we had about fifty members, no staff, no bank account, no offices and the heat was on to take over the creaking IT infrastructure that was still hosted at IBM. The development and IP processes existed in paper form but had never even been tried for real.

Today we have over 170 members, seventeen wonderful staff in three locations and great IT infrastructure. Our development and IP processes have been refined through several iterations and are demonstrating real value to the committers, members and ecosystem at Eclipse. These processes are definitely not perfect, but they get the job done.

But the true excitement of being part of Eclipse has been seeing the original vision of a vendor-neutral open source foundation at the centre of a commercial ecosystem coming to fruition. That was the original vision of people such as Skip McGaughey, Dave Bernstein, Danny Sabbah and John Swainson. I am sure that there are others, and I apologize for not listing everyone. Those “founders” if you will deserve a lot of credit for getting the Foundation created and the Bylaws, etc. written.

Sure, we have no shortage of challenges, but today there exists a multi-billion dollar ecosystem with hundreds of companies and millions of developers using Eclipse. The growth in projects at Eclipse has been awesome to watch as well. The breadth of technology being developed at Eclipse would have been hard to even imagine five years ago. That is awfully darn cool.

This is a pretty tough job. It involves dealing with many different interests and trying to find workable solutions. Anyone who has known me for a long time will tell you that I am not a natural politician. But this has been the single most exciting job I’ve ever had and I look forward to the challenges of the next five years. We are not resting on our laurels here at the Eclipse Foundation. The best is yet to come.

I am very happy to announce that we have a new project proposal at Eclipse.

Now the fact that we have a new project proposal is not in itself very interesting. We have those all the time. What is new and interesting about this one, however, is that it is being supported by our friends at Microsoft. That’s right, Microsoft is funding our member company Soyatec to develop Eclipse tools for Silverlight. This project is not only building development tools for Silverlight, it is also focused on easing the integration of Java-based web sites and services with Silverlight applications.

Microsoft also announced further support of open source communities by funding advanced Silverlight development capabilities with the Eclipse Foundation’s integrated development environment (IDE) ….Microsoft announced plans to support additional tools for developing Silverlight applications by providing funding to Soyatec, a France-based IT solutions provider and Eclipse Foundation member, to lead a project to integrate advanced Silverlight development capabilities into the Eclipse IDE. Soyatec plans to release the project under the Eclipse Public License Version 1.0 on SourceForge and submit it to the Eclipse Foundation as an open Eclipse project….

Please check out the SLDT project proposal, and comment on the newsgroup (if it’s not up, it will be shortly). We hope to see lots of interested parties join in on the effort.

As you can imagine, there have been lots of conversations that have led to this point. Those conversations lead me to believe that at least some people at Microsoft “get it” when it comes to open source. They are looking to open source as a path to increase their revenue and drive incremental customer value by making more of their stack interoperable with other technologies. It’s not about ideology, it’s about making good business and technical decisions.

We at the Eclipse Foundation are thrilled to have Microsoft supporting open source projects here. We hope this is just the beginning of a long and beneficial relationship. We certainly look at it as a strong endorsement of Eclipse’s model of collaborative development.

Next Wednesday, October 15th at 12:30pm Eastern time I will be giving my first web talk via Eclipse Live.

The talk is going to be “A Practitioners Guide to Ecosystem Development”. Consider it a peak into what we at the Eclipse Foundation think about how to build and foster ecosystems around the Eclipse technology.

It should be fun. I hope to see you there.

Bjorn and guests have been blogging about the results of the recent committer satisfaction survey at Eclipse. I think that the survey itself embodied genius in its simplicity: one question on “…how happy are you with the Foundation’s support of you and your project?”

As the Executive Director, I am pretty thrilled with the response, as 82.5% are on the “happy” side of the equation. That’s a darn good result.

Of course, there is always work to do and improvements to be made. You can see those thoughts well reflected in the comments that Bjorn gradually worked his way through in his blog series. The good news is committers are generally pretty happy with the IT infrastructure and the support they get. Unsurprisingly, they are a little less happy with the processes that we impose on them. There’s a shock! 🙂

To all of the staff at the Eclipse Foundation, I want to extend a hearty congratulations. I know that as the pointy haired boss I rarely say “thank you” enough for the great work that you do. So here are a few thank you’s, along with my personal favourite quotes from the survey.

To Denis Roy, Matt Ward and Karl Matthias: You are obviously taking customer service seriously and it is being noticed by our community. Thanks

Very happy, especially with the fast response time of the webmasters

To Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Anne Jacko and Gabe O’Brien: The development process and portal have come a very long way over the past year and your work is helping to improve our committers day-to-day interactions with the Foundation. Thanks!

The development process is well thought out. I also _really_ like the portal.

To Janet Campbell, Sharon Corbett and Barb Cochrane: You bear the brunt of running our IP due diligence process. A process which clearly puts a burden on our committers, but one which has been an enormous part of our community’s success. And you do it with grace and humour. Thanks!

Their’s is a tough job and, in my opinion, they do it very well