Board Elections
Well, the nominations are up, and 2009 Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors election is shaping up to be the most interesting yet. There are six nominees for Committer Rep and nine nominees for Sustaining Member Rep, each competing for four available seats. My recollection is that is the largest number of people running we have ever had. It’s great to see the interest and commitment!
We have an interesting cross-section of member companies sponsoring the nominees. There are candidates from large companies (Google, IBM, Red Hat, Wind River), small companies (EclipseSource, Ingres, Instantiations, OpenMake, TaskTop, WebTide, ) and independents (Markus Kuppe, Ed Merks). Of special note is the strong contingent of nominees from German companies (Bredex, empolis, Microdoc).
All-in-all, an excellent slate of candidates. I strongly encourage everyone to read their position papers, engage in the conversation and vote!
Happy Birthday!
Today marks the fifth birthday of the Eclipse Foundation. My how time flies when you’re having fun!
It is customary to mark these types of occasions with a bit of an retrospective. My challenge is to try to condense the swirl of activity that is Eclipse into some common themes and significant highlights.
So here goes: the top three things that I am proud of at the Eclipse Foundation over its first five years:
- Our community. The Eclipse community is a big place, filled with contributors, committers, users, developers and business people alike. Our community has grown dramatically over the past five years and we think the best is yet to come. But what I really enjoy is the gestalt of the Eclipse community. To best understand the sense of collaboration and innovation that permeates Eclipse, I highly recommend joining us at EclipseCon in March. I know I’m biased, but I really believe it to be one of the best developer conferences on the planet.
- Our technology. Eclipse’s technology has relatively little to do with the Eclipse Foundation per se, since we do not direct the projects or their technical decisions. However, I think that we at the Foundation can claim that we have helped to recruit new projects and new technology innovations to come to Eclipse. (Yesterday’s announcement that Jetty has proposed moving to Eclipse is a recent example.) And that has resulted in a much larger and more diverse collection of cool projects than I think any of us imagined five years ago.
- Our team. We really do have a great team working here at the Eclipse Foundation. Every single one is committed to and passionate about the Eclipse community, and works darn hard to make it a better place. Oh ya, and we have a lot of fun as well!
It has certainly been an exciting time over the past five years. I look forward to the challenges and excitement of the next five.
Interesting Times Indeed
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.
On Ecosystems
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.
Atta Boys (and Girls)
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
Life at Eclipse 