Eclipse Live Beta

We have finally launched a beta of Eclipse Live. The idea of Eclipse Live is to 1) provide a single source for all the multi-media content related to Eclipse, ie podcasts, webinars, screencams, etc. and 2) provide a way for people to identify the great content and share their feedback through comments and voting.

We want to solicit content from the entire community, therefore anyone can submit content. We only ask that it has to be about an Eclipse project or Eclipse based product. This means if you have an upcoming webinar about your commercial Eclipse based product, we would like to help promote it on Eclipse Live. If an Eclipse project has a demo or screencam about their project, please feel free to submit it.

Eclipse Live will also be used to promote the Eclipse webinar series. To make it easier for people to keep track of upcoming webinars, we have setup an rss feed that will be used to announce any upcoming events.

We also want to encourage people to comment and vote on the content. If you listen to a podcast or webinar and like it, please take the time to enter a comment and rank it. To leave comments and vote, you will be required to login but we have tied it to bugzilla, so no need for yet another username/password.

As I said, this is a beta, so we want to hear your comments. Let us know what you like/dislike and any bugs you might find. Next week we will start promoting Eclipse Live from the eclipse.org home page, so I am hoping to iron out any of the major problems before then.

EclipseCon 2007 Demographics

When people register for EclipseCon we ask some ‘optional’ questions to better understand who is attending EclipseCon. Last year I shared the results via my blog, so I thought it might be interesting to do the same this year.

About 1000 people took the time to answer the questions, so I think the results are a pretty good reflection of who was there.

Length of time using Eclipse

62% of the conference respondents have been using Eclipse for more than 2 years. This is a big jump from last year, when 42% had been using Eclipse for more than 2 years. Only 13% of the respondents have been using Eclipse for less than 1 year.

Job description

If you thought there are a lot of developers at EclipseCon, you were correct. 65% of the respondents identified themselves as a developer or architect. This was the exact same percentage in 2006.

What projects are hot?

It is always interesting to see what projects people are using. No surprise JDT is #1. RCP usage continues to be very strong.

Type of Organization

Finally we asked what type of development is Eclipse being used for? Not surprisingly 44% of the respondents worked for ISVs but close behind we 37% using Eclipse for internal IT development. Again, very little change from 2006.

Eclipse and OSGi news from IBM and Cisco

Not all of the Eclipse and OSGi news is happening at EclipseCon.  IBM and Cisco just announced at Voicecon a client platform for unified communication and collaboration.   Great to see Cisco getting behind Eclipse and OSGi.

Award Winners

Last night we announced the winners of the Eclipse Community Awards. Congratulations to Chris, Ed, Kimberly, Tom and Daniel for winning the individual awards. I am thrilled to see QNX Momentics, TIBCO Business Studio, PSICAT, eclipse-cs Checkstyle and JP Morgan win in the technology award categories. There were lots of deserving individuals and products up for the awards, so congratulations to all.

I’d also like to thank the judges that selected the technology winners. We really appreciated the time they spent reviewing all of the nominations and making the difficult final decisions.

Special thanks for Nokia, Motorola and Intel that contributed the prizes for the individual winners. All five individual winners receive a Nokia or Motorola phone and a book series from Intel.

Btw, Chris I believe it is a tradition that the Top Ambassador hosts a party on Thursday night.

No NetBeans Girls at EclipseCon

Much to my dismay, it looks like Jonathan Schwartz has denied us the opportunity for a return engagement of the NetBeans Girls. Roumen was kind enough to make a plea for us to his management but came back with a rather lame excuse; they actually want Eclipse to pay for them?

Sigh, I hope this doesn’t mean the Sun marketing machine is losing its gusto. Roumen, please tell me Sun has some witty marketing stunt awaiting for us at EclispeCon.  It just won’t be the same. 

Getting ready for EclipseCon

The week before EclipseCon is typically for me the second busiest week of the year; the busiest being EclipseCon. Most of my time is spent preparing for the press; although in previous years I’ve also been responsible for the exhibitors but this year Donald has done a great job.

I am happy with the way our press releases have turned out. We are doing three releases on Tuesday:

1. A release announcing the winners of the Eclipse Community Awards.
2. A release that essentially aggregates all of the press releases being put out by our member companies. I’ve counted over 20 press releases from member companies, so look out for lots of Eclipse news.
3. A release that highlights the RAP, ATF and DLTK projects. Ajax and dynamic languages are pretty hot these days and we are lucky to have 3 interesting projects in these areas. RAP just released their m2 release and Innoopract has just made available a pretty timely demo for those people attending EclispseCon. Wayne has been doing some blogging about ATF. DLTK is probably one of the most underrated projects at Eclipse. Xored is leading the project but Cisco is heavily contributing to help develop a world class Tcl IDE. DLTK is also working on a Ruby and Python IDE. All three project should be interesting to watch.

We have also scheduled a press conference for Tuesday of EclipseCon. Anyone with a press and analyst pass can attend; the room will only fit so many people but I will try to post the slides. The plan is to talk about the importance of OSGi and Equinox, plus the above releases.

EclipseCon is also a time for interesting new project proposals. For those who want to keep up on the latest new proposals, I highly recommend monitoring the Eclipse Review RSS feed. Check out the two proposals that were put out in the last couple of days. Take a look at the companies that are proposing to lead these two projects. Great to see new companies looking to Eclipse as being a community for developing open source software.

Interesting new plugins on EPIC

I subscribe to the EPIC RSS feed that feeds to me the new and updated plugins that are added to EPIC. There seems to be about 2-3 new plugins per day. Lots of interesting stuff being developed in the Eclipse community.

Sometimes something new catches my eye. For instance this plugin called Illatis Stepin; interesting name but interesting to see that it is a debugger for stored procedures in MySQL. A nice example of the crossover between the Eclipse and MySQL communities.

What is an ‘Open Source Company’?

There is a conversation brewing in the blogsphere on the topic of when a company can be called ‘open source’. Nat Torkington of O’Reilly seems to have started the discussion as he attempts to build the agenda for OSCON. Allison Randal and Matt Assay have also chimed in.

IMHO, the term ‘open source company’ is very misleading and is hurting the spirit of the open source. Companies like Alfresco, EnterpriseDB are software companies just like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etc. They all act like software companies; they have profit motives, shareholders, investors, customers, competitors, developer communities, support teams, etc. They also can go public, bankrupt or get acquired.  There is nothing wrong this either.

However, it really does seem that some companies are trying to cloak themselves by creating the term ‘an open source company.  I find this disingenuous and in the long-term damaging to the term ‘open source’.  Open source is how software gets developed and licensed, not a marketing term to create a category of companies.

Blogger Party Set for Sunday Night at EclipseCon

Looks like we have quorum for an EclipseCon blogger party on Sunday night.   Due to popular demand we will meet in the Hyatt Lobby bar from 7-9pm.

zx, Alex, Pascal, Gunnar, Ian Bull, Neil, Remy, Benjamin and Patrick all said they were interested.   Doug Schaefer said he might come late.  All other bloggers are welcome.  Wanna-be bloggers or PlanetEclipse groupies feel free to drop by too.