EclipseCon Tutorial Deadline

Just a reminder the deadline for submitting EclipseCon tutorial proposals is tomorrow, November 1. Go here, if you are interested in browsing the list of proposals already submitted.

btw, Nov. 15 is the deadline for proposing sessions.

An interesting use of RCP…

It is great that people are sending in examples of RCP applications. We posting a list here.

Every once in a while someone sends me an example that is really different. Last week, Wolfgang Gehner for Infonoia SA sent me a link to the application they did for the World Health Organization (WHO) HIV/AIDS Toolkit. A really nice use of the technology.

The Importance of Technical Articles

I think publishing articles is one of the most effective way of getting the word out about Eclipse. If marketing is about having conversations, then articles are a good way to start that conversation.

For example, Lawrence Mandel and Jeff Liu recently published an Eclipse Web Tools article on the O’Reilly ONJava site. I thought it would be an interesting experiment, although completely unscientific, to track where this article got mentioned.

There were the usual suspects, like the WTP home page, eclipse.org home page. But it also got mentioned on EclipseZone and some Eclipse friendly blogs. Then there were a number of other sites (here) , and blogs (here, here, here, here) (including non-English blogs) that I don’t regularly follow.

Although most of these sites just linked to the original article, they do introduce Eclipse Web Tools to their readers. It did not require any additional effort from the WTP team, Lawrence, Jeff or myself. A good example of starting the conversation…..

Register for EclipseCon and Get an Eclipse RCP Book

We are starting to gear up for EclipseCon. To incent people to register early, you not only get a deal on the price but we will also be giving a copy of the new Eclipse RCP book to the first 200 passport registrants. For those that have already registered for a passport, don’t worry we will save a book for you.

btw, for those that want the Eclipse RCP book sooner than EclipseCon, you can order it now.

Fire the Marketers!

Observations On Marketing Open Source Projects

On a number of occasions I have been asked for advice on how to ‘market’ an Eclipse open source project. I know there is no one secret formula but I do think there are some best practices. Here is what I often tell people.

1. Fire the marketers. Well maybe not fire them but if you expect the marketing department to make your open source project take off, you are deeply misguided. Let’s face it; the success of Eclipse is not based on traditional marketing. Right now, there is a marketing department of 1 at Eclipse and even when IBM started Eclipse there were only 2 people working on marketing. Contrary to what some people might say, the Eclipse marketing machine is really the community. Successful open source projects are about developers talking to developers. It is about building the community.

2. The conversation starts with code. Unless you have code in cvs, don’t expect a lot of people to listen. Developers like the ‘show me, don’t tell me’ approach. To keep the conversation going, a project needs lots of incremental releases. A release once every 18 months doesn’t cut it. The Eclipse platform team does one every 6 weeks. The conversation about 3.2 has already started here, here, here. And remember 3.2 isn’t expected to ship until June 2006!

3. Make it easy to start the conversation. Once code is available, make sure you have the tutorials, examples and white papers available so someone can easily start using the technology. Also be darn sure that a skilled person is monitoring the newsgroup and bugzilla database to respond to any questions or issues.

4. Create technical content. There are tons of developer oriented portals, publications and conferences that are always hungry for good technical content. Within just the Eclipse community we have EclipseZone, EclipseTechForge, Eclipse Developer Journal, Eclipse World, EclipseCon that are always looking for good technical content. Writing articles always seems to be the last thing developers want to do, but it is a great way to get the word out. Getting articles published is really not that difficult. Lawrence Mandel and Jeff Liu have taken the time and I think the results will be great for the Web Tools Project. Giving presentations at technical conferences is also a great way to meet your users in person. For the real keeners, a number of book publishers have successful Eclipse titles and are always looking for the next hot thing.

5. Create a persona for the project. I think there are two essential things that each project should be doing: 1) the project leaders and key committers should be writing blogs, and 2) each project should have relevant, up to date project web sites. Blogs are a very popular media for communicating directly to developers. It takes less than 5 minutes to setup a blog. Postings don’t need to be long but just provide some insight into the activities and people working on the project. Arthur Ryman and the BIRT team are two examples. (Although I do wish the BIRT team would clean up their spam :-). If you do create a blog, make sure you send your feed into planeteclipse. Project web sites should be the gateway to the community. Make it easy for people to know how to participate in the community. The BIRT web site is a good example.

6. Get your competitors involved. I often get blank stares when I mention this. Well in open source, if you can get your competitors to adopt your project, you have just grown the entire community. It is not just you talking about the project, it is your competitors too. The Eclipse Web Tools project is a great example: IBM, BEA, JBoss, ObjectWeb, Oracle are all building on top of Web Tools. Now, that is a lot of people talking about Web Tools.

7. Thank the contributors. If someone writes an article about your project and mentions your project in a blog, make sure you thank them. Often the best way to do that is link to the blog posting from your own blog or leave a comment. Bloggers love to have more traffic to the web site.

8. Promote companies that use your technology. Eclipse gets embedded into hundreds of software products. A good way of showing adoption and momentum is to promote organizations that have embedded your project into their offering. The CDT team did a recent press release that acknowledged companies embedding CDT. It is even better when a company advertises that they are using your project. It is essentially an ingredient branding strategy.

9. If you love something, set it free. It is important that companies don’’t claim too much ‘ownership’ of a project. That is something we are constanly vigilant against at the Foundation. Open source and Eclipse is about being vendor neutral, transparent and open. If a project is too tightly aligned with a company then the momentum is stunted. Having a project referred to as ‘Company ABC’’s Eclipse Project’’ is bad. To IBM’’s credit, they realized this with the original projects and created the Eclipse Foundation.

10. Give the marketing guy a hug. Okay, I don’’t have a tenth observation but I was just kidding that they should be fired. The point is that we are all marketers. If you think your project is not getting the attention it deserves, then maybe there is something you can do. Besides Mike, I really do like my job.

I am sure I have missed some other very valid points on marketing open source projects. I’d be interested in hearing peoples experiences.

Press Release Guidelines

Thanks to everyone that provided feedback on the draft press release guidelines. The final version is now posted here.

Eclipse Support for OSGi R4

Tomorrow we will be issuing a press release to announce support for the OSGi R4 specification. To some people this may seem like old news, but in some ways I think the Eclipse use of the OSGi specification as the component model is a misunderstood feature of Eclipse.

For those that may not know, the OSGi Alliance was formed to set a specification for the once-promised home gateway technology. Home gateways didn’t really take off but the OSGi specification has had success in the automotive and mobile phone industry. The OSGi Alliance describes their technology as follows:

The OSGi™ specifications define a standardized , component oriented , computing environment for networked services . Adding an OSGi Service Platform to a networked device (embedded as well as servers), adds the capability to manage the life cycle of the software components in the device from anywhere in the network. Software components can be installed, updated, or removed on the fly without having to disrupt the operation of the device. Software components are libraries or applications that can dynamically discover and use other components. Software components can be bought off the shelf or are developed in house.

When Eclipse RCP started to give birth, the Platform team realized they needed a more dynamic component model. To the team’s credit, they didn’t go out an build a new component model, they found the OSGi specification met their needs and implemented the specification within the core Eclipse 3.0 runtime. So for the last 2 years Eclipse RCP has included a full implementation of the OSGi framework. In fact, I would content Eclipse RCP is one of the most widely deployed OSGi implementations.

So what’s new to warrant a press release? Two main things:

1. The OSGi Alliance is finalizing their R4 specification and announcing it this week at their OSGi Congress in Paris. Mike Milinkovich and Jeff McAffer are speaking at this conference. Eclipse will be one of the first implementations of the R4 specification. In fact, the close working relationships between Eclipse and OSGi resulted in the Eclipse implementation being used at OSGi as their reference implementation.
2. The Eclipse Equinox project has been promoted to a sub-project of the Platform project. The Equinox project will focus on developing a community of OSGi developers. This will make it easy for people to use an open source implementation of the OSGi framework as their application runtime environment.

If you interested, the press release is already posted on the eclipse.org web site.

EclipseCon Exhibitor Packages

If anyone is interested in exhibiting at EclipseCon, the exhibitor package is now posted on the EclipseCon web site.

Also don’t forget about the Call for Submissions. Deadline for submitting tutorials is Nov. 1 and presentations Nov. 15.

New Examples of RCP Based Applications

Back near the end of May, I posted a series of screenshots showing different RCP applications. A number of people have sent me links to new RCP applications, so I thought it was about time to post an updated presentation. You can also see details of the applications on the RCP application page on the Eclipse web site.

If anyone would like to have their application listed, please send in a 50 word description, url and a screenshot.

Compuware Becomes Strategic Developer

The other big announcement today is that Compuware has announced it has become a Strategic Developer member of the Eclipse Foundation. Compuware has been a long time add-in provider member of the Foundation. It is great to see they are increasing their level of participation and building their OptimaJ product line on top of Eclipse.