Life at Eclipse

I was very intrigued to learn about the European Union Public License today. Having a government-drafted and supported open source license is breaking new ground as far as I know.

I found in particularly interesting that they drafters selected the Eclipse Public License as one of the licenses they will be compatible with. That is a wonderful endorsement of the EPL, and a recognition of Eclipse’s adoption in Europe.

I wonder if the European Commission will be seeking OSI approval?

We are just a few weeks away from our second annual Eclipse Summit Europe event. Last year’s event was an outstanding gathering of the Eclipse community, and I am definitely looking forward to this year’s as well.

ESE is a little bit different from EclipseCon, and in some ways even more ambitious. In addition to keynotes and talks, it also adds in workshops and symposia, which provide an opportunity for conversations, rather than the more typical one-way dialogue you get with a talk. Last year’s symposia were very well received, and I expect even more from this year’s.

With great keynotes from Erich Gamma of IBM and Eclipse fame, and Jörg Sievert from SAP Ventures we have something for both the technical and the business audience.

So, if you haven’t already registered, please do. It’s going to be a great community event.

See you there!

Sitting at home in my pajamas with a fever and a sore throat does not usually put me in an great mood. However, there have been a number of news items this week that really do make for some very good news for the Eclipse community and ecosystem that I wanted to write about.

In no particular order:

1. The Eclipse community kicked ass in the JDJ Reader’s Choice Awards. “Eclipse” or “Eclipse IDE” won five first place awards for Best Java Application, Best Java Debugging Tool, Best Java IDE Environment, Best Java Open Source Product, and Most Innovative Java Product. SWT (the Standard Widget Toolkit) won Best Java Class Library. EMF and WTP were also finalists in several categories.

   But if you dig a little deeper, it gets even better. By my count products based on Eclipse won more five categories and were finalists sixteen more times. Products such as MyEclipse, JBuilder 2007, WebLogic Workshop, Together and Actuate BIRT all did very well in the voting.

   Congratulations to all!

2. I noticed announcements on three brand-new Eclipse-based products this week that look pretty interesting. First, RedHat beta released its RedHat Developer Studio to numerous positive reviews. Second, CodeGear is shipping JGear, which provides Java application performance, visual development, and team collaboration capabilities not part of Eclipse. Third, Motorola released MOTODEV Studio, their development tools for a wide array of Motorola products.

   Obviously, growth in products based on the Eclipse platform continues rapidly. My apologies to any cool new products that I missed.

3. We had three new project proposals this week. I invite you to check out and comment on Abireo [Swing/SWT integration], Open Financial Markets Platform, and Virtual Prototyping Platform.

   I find the Financial Markets proposal particularly intriguing as it is being proposed by a bank and represents a foray by the Eclipse community into a whole new and very interesting world of finance.

4. And last but not least, the Eclipse community model received some nice coverage in blogosphere by Matt Asay and Glynn Moody and in the press by Paul Krill. It’s always nice when someone thinks that Eclipse is open source’s best kept secret.

Not bad for one week, eh?

There’s been a bit of conversation going on between Savio Rodrigues and Angry Bill Burke about the value of trademarks this week. This is rather timely, given the recent update to the Eclipse Foundation Trademark Guidelines and the parallel conversation about “CDT for Windows” going on between Ian Skerrett and Doug Schaefer here at Eclipse.

I have to admit that when I first read Angry Bill’s take on trademarks I thought that he just didn’t get it. On my second read, I realized that he gets it all too well.

You see, trademarks are a control point. One that JBoss use{s|d} to great effect. But as Savio pointed out, what Bill sees as a problem is actually exactly the outcome that communities such as Apache and Eclipse want to achieve. Open source startups and their VC backers want to create barriers to entry, and trademarks are a way to do that. Communities want to lower barriers of entry to projects in order to foster diversity and adoption. Different motivations result in different approaches. Bill wants to make money for his company. We want to make communities that make money for many companies.

In many ways, this is part of the larger conversation on what “open source” means. Open source companies and open source communities both use the term “open source”, but they mean quite radically different things by the term. Even if they all share a common licensing definition, there are quite different development, community and IP processes in play that make them distinct models. We really do need a new lexicon, because this is very confusing to anyone outside the FLOSS cognoscenti.

As the Eclipse Trademark Guidelines state:

The Eclipse Foundation holds the trademarks for the project names and logos on behalf of, and for the benefit of, the Eclipse projects. The individual projects are not separate legal entities and thus not able to hold trademarks individually. The Eclipse Foundation is a legal entity and thus holds the trademarks on behalf of the projects.

Our (somewhat belated) goal is to reduce any possibility of confusion between what is coming from Eclipse and what is coming from a commercial adopter. Or for that matter, an open source fork hosted at another organization.

Angry Bill may think this “sucks”, but it’s how communities foster involvement and participation.

IANAL, not even on TV.

I noticed an article in InformationWeek that asserts that the Eclipse Public License (EPL) and GPLv3 are compatible. Although I think that it would be a good thing if it was easier for the two communities to share and re-use code, the article is (sadly) incorrect. The licenses are not compatible. At least not in the same way that the Apache license is compatible with the GPLv3. (In case you’re wondering, this is also the position of the FSF itself, although it’s obvious as their license page has not yet been updated for GPLv3.)

I theorize that the confusion may have resulted from the popular misconception that the ASL and EPL are very similar licenses. They’re actually not. Although they are both “business-friendly”, the ASL is a BSD-style license whereas the EPL is more a Mozilla (MPL)-style copyleft license.

License compatibility is an extremely complex topic. The FSF defines two quite different things: license compatibility and GPL compatibility. The latter basically says that a license is compatible with the GPL if it allows its source code to be re-licensed under the GPL. It is this level of compatibility that led Sam Ruby to quip that “The GPL V3 license is compatible with the ASF V2 license in precisely the same way that blood type AB is compatible with blood type O.” (I think he was specifically referring to the one-way arrow on this diagram. Apache is the universal donor. GPL is the universal recipient.)

As defined, the EPL is definitely not “GPL compatible” (see Section 3 of the EPL).

However, for many developers “compatibility” may mean something quite different. As much fun as cutting-and-pasting code can be, many developers in many contexts prefer to follow component-level re-use. For example, the not-quite-official-but-relevant-nonetheless Apache Foundation policy on third party licensing endorses the use of EPL-licensed binaries in Apache projects. For many developers, this level of license compatibility is sufficient, because it allows re-use of a component they would otherwise have to re-implement.

I have had a few conversations where people have expressed the opinion that this second type of EPL-GPLv3 compatibility may be possible under certain circumstances. So one of my summer projects over the next couple of months will be to work with our lawyers to see what might be possible.

BTW if you think that licensing complexity is only an issue in open source, you definitely need to read this post on Microsoft’s Byzantine licensing regime. At least our stuff is free 🙂