Life at Eclipse

Bjorn’s latest blog post on “Not A Product” has received some passionate responses. It is important that everyone understand that the opinions expressed in Bjorn’s post are his own. They are most definitely not the consensus position of either the Eclipse Foundation staff or of the Board.

Bjorn has served the Eclipse community long and well. He deserves the opportunity to express his opinions as he sees fit. If anyone has misinterpreted Bjorn’s posts as some sort of signal of change in the direction of the Eclipse Foundation, I apologize. They are most certainly not.

Since November 2001, the Eclipse ecosystem has been built upon a strongly defined platform built with a high degree of quality and a deep concern for API evolution. Since 2001, Eclipse has shipped binaries to help developers quickly adopt our platform. That is what has gotten us to this level of success, and that is the model we will be using going forward with e4 and beyond.

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!

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.