Life at Eclipse

I have seen more than a few references to Tim O’Reilly‘s post on IDE buzz. I actually thought that Tim’s post was well written and thoughtfully speculative. No one can reasonably take issue with statements like:

I don’t really follow the IDE wars, but this result surprised me, so I thought I’d ask my readers if you have any ideas about this result. It could be an artifact of the Yahoo! user base, for example, with very different results if we were able to run the same exercise against Google search volume…. So I’m not sure I’d take it as the final word on the popularity of the two IDEs.

But how I’ve seen Tim’s speculations used since have not exactly been to the same level of quality, if you know what I mean.

Two things to think about:

1. First off, Eclipse (the blue line) has now moved into the number one spot on the graph. The point here is not that Eclipse is #1. It’s that no one really knows what makes these indices go up or down, and as Tim himself points out, no one knows if there is any correlation between the numbers and actual usage. Buzz is good fun and all, but great technology, adoption, ecosystem strength, predictability and open governance are all examples of things which matter much more IMHO.



2. Secondly, as shown by a very small experiment we tried, many of these games are easy to game. For example, on the same page as the Buzz meter, you can find a pseudo stock chart for IDEs. A few days ago, we noticed that Eclipse was not the most highly valued of the stocks. Notice that it is today. Why? Because six of us at the Eclipse Foundation went to the trouble to register accounts and use our mythological $10,000 to buy Eclipse shares. We moved Eclipse into first place and each made a tidy “profit”. The fact that just six people can do that clearly means that this market is lacking in liquidity. Which is finance-speak for it’s a sucker’s game.

The point here is not pick on any particular metric, but to hopefully make folks a little more discerning the next time they’re reading claims of greatness.

The new elected reperesentatives on the Eclipse Board of Directors as of April 1 will be:

Committer Representatives:

Scott Lewis (*)
Kai-Uwe Maetzel (*)
Jeff McAffer
Tim Wagner

Add-In Provider Representatives:

Jochen Krause
Howard Lewis (*)
Mike Taylor
Todd Williams (*)

I would also like to recognize the contribution of Rich Main and John Wiegand who are leaving the Eclipse Board after having served since its inception. The Eclipse community owes them a great deal for their many hours of efffort of behalf of the Eclipse community.

(*) Returning board member.

Anyone interested in my previous comments regarding the Higgins announcement should also read Bob Sutor’s post that so eloquently lays to rest much of the hyperbole concerning this announcement.

No, I am not talking about one of my all-time favourite B movies. I’m talking about the Higgins announcement today. (Higgins being both a project at Eclipse and a Tasmanian long-tailed mouse.)

In the press release, IBM, Novell and Parity Communications announced support for the Eclipse Higgins project. The announcement was widely covered by both the press and the blogs.

If Parity Communications rings a bell, that’s because it’s the name of Paul Trevithick’s company, Paul being Higgins’ project leader. Paul, John Clippinger and Mary Ruddy are the founders of the SocialPhysics project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Higgins is the implementation of many of the ideas being worked on there.

The goals of of the project are ambitious. From the proposal:

The Higgins Trust Framework platform intends to address four challenges: the lack of common interfaces to identity/networking systems, the need for interoperability, the need to manage multiple contexts, and the need to respond to regulatory, public or customer pressure to implement solutions based on trusted infrastructure that offers security and privacy.

Higgins is definitely one of the truly innovative and interesting projects going on at Eclipse. I’m very happy to see the additional backing of IBM and Novell behind the project. It’s great news for them and for Eclipse.

If you’re interested in learning more about the project or contributing, here is the project newsgroup.

Check this out. The publishers of EclipseMagazin in Germany have created a 20,000 euro award program for “Outstanding European Contributions on Java and Eclipse“. Very exciting!