Life at Eclipse

I have some very good news for new projects at Eclipse. At the board meeting last week, an important revision to the Eclipse Intellectual Property Policy was approved. Under the new revision, projects which are in incubation — and which are clearly marking their webpages and downloads as such — can now start to have their IP submissions approved while they are working on the code, rather than waiting for prior approval.

So how does this work? All projects still have to submit contribution questionnaires. The difference is that once a CQ has been reviewed for license compatibility, an incubating project will be authorized via IPzilla to check in the code to CVS and start working on it.

IP due diligence will need to be completed before the project can ship anything labeled as a release candidate or release.

Hopefully this will help us avoid past scenarios where new projects have had to wait for a long time for IP approvals in order to get started!

I just stumbled across the news that the GCJ team is now using the Eclipse Compiler for Java as the front end to GCJ.

This is pretty darn cool. ECJ is a rock-solid and highly regarded technology. I’m glad to see it getting even more adoption. It has been used in a number of Apache projects for a while as well (although finding a useful reference to that proved harder than I thought…anyone out there have a reference handy?)

This is rather cool. As noted by Nat Torkington, Dave Thomas has just been recognized by the ACM as a Distinguished Engineer.

Dave was the founder of OTI, which after it was acquired by IBM eventually became the core development team for Eclipse. Other than my family, he’s probably had more influence on my life than anyone: professor, matchmaker with my wife (long story) and kick-ass boss (both figuratively and literally) for ten very formative years. It’s great to see him recognized in this way.

And for those who remember the really early days of OO programming, there is certainly some irony in having Dave Thomas’ and Dave Ungar’s names beside each other in the list. Watching those guys spar at the early OOPSLAs was really good sport.

Also, as Nat pointed out, Robert Lefkowitz (aka r0ml) was awarded the same honor. If the name sounds familiar, that’s because r0ml is one of our keynote speakers at our upcoming EclipseCon. I saw him speak in three different sessions at OSCON 2006, and I am really looking forward to his talk. He is one of the best speakers I have ever seen.

And along the lines of continuing Denis’ education, I would like to point out that I immediately noticed a number of names on the list as Old Dudes Who Know Smalltalk. It’s nice to see that the ACM recognize those who “get it”.

1. Dave Thomas
2. Robert Lefkowitz
3. Laura Hill
4. Larry Constantine
5. Dave Ungar (ok, he invented Self, but he definitely knew Smalltalk)

I would be willing to bet that there are a couple of other Smalltalk dudes on the list whose name I just didn’t recognize. Feel free to comment on who I missed.

As has already been reported by eWeek, InfoWorld and Linux Watch the Eclipse Foundation is going through the process of joining three different standards organizations: the Java Community Process (JCP), the Object Management Group (OMG) and the OSGi Alliance.

I guess that we should be flattered that Eclipse is newsworthy enough that the articles broke before we even issued the press release. 😀

Our motivations are pretty well documented in the eWeek article. I largely view this as part of Eclipse maturing and playing a more active part in the broader community. Many projects at Eclipse rely on standards from JCP, OMG and OSGi and we believe its simply good behaviour to contribute back by joining. Whether we have the resources available to actively participate will take some time to sort out. But if any committer is interested in representing Eclipse in an expert group, please let us know.

The longstanding relationships with these groups should be well-known by observers of Eclipse, but here are a few examples.

• The Eclipse Web Tools Project (WTP) alone provides tooling and implementations of JSR 244 (JEE 5), JSR 220 (EJB3), JSR 127 (JSF) and others.
• Equinox and OSGi have a very tight relationship, with regular interactions between the expert groups there and committers working on code in Equinox.
• The Eclipse Modeling Project provides implementations for OMG’s UML2, OCL and other specifications

Some of the other organizations we’re working towards joining include the like of ObjectWeb, who has been a member of the Eclipse Foundation since day one. We’ve also been participating in the OpenAjax Alliance for quite a while as well, and I’m honored to say that I was elected to its steering committee.

There are some who are going to view this story through the lense of the historically frosty relationship with Sun, and try to colour this as somehow controversial. But I really don’t see any basis for controversy here. Sun has always acknowledged that Eclipse is part of the larger Java ecosystem, and we’ve always used JCP specifications. It’s simply time to recognize that.

So one last (and somewhat belated) post related to the Eclipse 5th birthday celebrations.

As many of you may already know, over the past month or so we tracked down the 65 or so people who were the original founders of both the Eclipse Project and the Eclipse Consortium and gave each a small gift in recognition of their contributions. If you see someone sporting a black fleece vest with the Eclipse logo and “Founder”, then you can be sure that “they were there”.

A special thanks is owed to Mike Valenta and Bodgan Gheorghe who did the CVS spelunking required to create the list of original committers.

Eclipse has had a wonderful history of growth and community over the past five years. I am looking forward to being part of the next five.