When will we hit 1 million?

I am heading out for a 2 week vacation. It looks like I won’t be hear to see the counter roll over to 1 million downloads. So when will we actually get to 1 million? Right now we are at 854,694. It seems we are getting about 20,000 per day. So assuming no additional denial of service attacks, I am going to predict we hit 1 million on August 4. I will let someone else predict the time.

It has been fun to watch the counter go up. The best part is having 40+ people pledging donations and time to their charity of choice. There is still time if you want to join in if you are so inclined.

Special thanks to Kim Horne for coming up with the idea in the first place.

OSS, Agendas and Commercial Profits

There have been some discussions lately about open source software and the corporate agendas that are tied to them. A thread on Javalobby where someone accuses IBM for having an agenda to sell WSAD and Sun having an agenda for NetBeans. Also Marc Fleury, making what I find to be the obvious statement that few people do work for free.

I must admit I am biased but this all seems a bit too obvious to me. Sure there are small open source projects that are staffed by volunteers and these proejcts are very important. I use RSSOwl everyday and I am thankful to Ben for making such a great RSS reader freely available.

However, projects like Eclipse, Apache, Linux, Mozilla all have paid professional developers working as committers and form the backbone of the projects. Mike Milinkovich was recently quoted that 90% of the committers at Eclipse are paid by a commerical company. I don’t see this as being a bad thing? However, open source is more than just the committers, each of these projects is supported by large community of volunteers that test, submit bug fixes (sometime with code), write white papers and tutorials. This is really what makes open source special and such a powerful force.

Does the involvement of commerical companies include corporate agendas and, dare, I say it ‘profits’. Duh, yes. Is this a bad thing? It could be but I think the beauty of the open source model is that it makes it pretty transparent. Lets be clear, software companies contributing to open source communities are trying to sell software, services and support. That is there business after all.

I don’t see it as a bad thing that IBM would like people to buy their commercial tools that are built on Eclipse. For example, lets take the complaint that Eclipse is late to have a JSP editor and it was IBM’s way to force developers to buy WSAD. I have no knowledge about IBM’s product strategy but I do know that a JSP editor for Eclipse has been available from M7, Exadel, Genuitec. Nothing is forcing someone to buy IBM software. This is the true beauty of open source and Eclipse being a common platform. Companies can have agendas but open source provides a guarantee of no vendor lock-in.

Software companies making profits by being involved in open source software is good. This allows projects like Apache, Mozilla, Linux and Eclipse to prosper. In fact, I would love for all the Eclipse users to buy commerical products from the many vendors in the Eclispe ecosystem. This makes Eclipse stronger.

Reporter looking to speak to Eclipse users

John Waters at AD Trends is working on a story for App Trends about Java tools and would like to speak with some users of the Eclipse IDE. Specifically he’s looking for:

1. A developer who is currently using the Eclipse IDE as his/her basic Java development tool and adding plug-ins to customize its functionality
2. An IT manager whose developers are doing this, either with company’s blessing or without

If you are willing to talk to John send me an e-mail and I will forward it on to him.

Promoting Eclipse C/C++ to Linux and Embedded Developers

We would like to raise the awareness of Eclipse with Linux and Embedded Developers. Lots of people know of Eclipse as being a great platform for Java development tools. Eclipse also has a great C/C++ IDE which is being used by lots of companies as the foundation for their Linux and/or embedded developer tools. The list includes QNX, Red Hat, Novell SUSE, Monta Vista, TimeSys, Intel, etc.

NOTE: Unfortunately I am sure I have missed someone. If I have please send me a link and I will update my posting.

The good news is that CDT project is planning their 3.0 release for the middle of August. We are planning to do a press release announcing the new release on August 2, the week before Linux World. I’d love to hear people’s comments or suggestion on what are the cool new features in CDT.

The Eclipse ecosystem at JavaOne

The Eclipse ecosystem really shined at JavaOne. David Berlind did a good job summarizing this fact in his blog.

Congratulations to all the Eclipse member organizations who made announcements at JavaOne. Thank you for the great support you are providing the Eclipse community.