Life at Eclipse

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

Some of you might have noticed that when Ganymede was first launched yesterday, the eclipse.org website was reeeaaallllyyyy slow for a little while.

By way of explanation, I offer the following:

But more seriously, many thanks to Denis, Matt, Nathan and Karl for all of their work in getting our IT infrastructure ready for the deluge.

As a Friend of Eclipse, I was able to download Ganymede this afternoon. Not only did I get it sooner, I got it faster. In fact, thanks to the dedicated bandwidth it was crazy fast to download.

Thanks goes to Denis Roy and the webmaster team. It looks like the Ganymede distribution setup is well architected and running smoothly.

So friends get benefits!