Finals Days to Vote for the Eclipse Community Awards

This Friday, February 27 at 5pmET is the deadline to vote for the individuals in the Eclipse Community Awards. If you haven’t already voted, now is the time to vote for the individuals that you think deserves special recognition for the extra effort they have contributed to the Eclipse community.

Thanks to the people at EclipseZone, you can read interviews with each of the nominees.

Top Committers

• Martin Oberhuber Martin has been nominated for his work in leading the TM project and for reviving the Eclipse Architecture Council.
• Steffen Pingel Steffen has been nominated for his contributions to the Mylyn project, with half of last year’s commits to the project coming from him.
• Thomas Watson Thomas has been nominated for being the man behind the Equinox curtain. He also represents Eclipse on the EEG and CPEG committees at OSGi.org
• Jason Weathersby Jason is well known for his work on the BIRT project, speaking at conferences, monitoring the news group and writing papers.
• Paul Webster Paul has been nominated for his efforts helping people on IRC and newsgroups.
• David Williams David has been nominated for his work on the WebTools project, providing an incubator within WebTools and for helping to catch those release trains

Top Contributors

• Frank Becker Frank is well known for his work on the Mylyn project, in particular for his work on the Bugzilla connector.
• Benjamin Cabe Benjamin was nominated for all the work he has done in the PDE project, along with his contributions to the modelling and platform projects.
• Dave Carver Dave has been nominated for his contributions to the WTP project, where he’s involved in the XSL tools and the visual editor for XML. He is also a member of the architectural council.
• Eugene Kuleshov Eugene has reported or commented on almost 3000 bugs in 7 years. He has been nominated for his work on the m2eclipse project, and is noted as being an incredibly dedicated Eclipse advocate
  Unfortunately, we do not have an interview available with Eugene.
• Miles Parker Miles has been nominated for his work with the Equinox p2 team, where he has contributed something far more valuable to that team than patches: an end-user perspective that is different from that of Eclipse developers
• Tom Schindl Tom has been nominated for helping to shape up the Platform UI and Databinding and recently bringing the UFacekit project over to Eclipse. He has also had a fundamental impact on the future of Eclipse through his contributions to the e4 project

Top Ambassadors

• Nick Boldt A committer for many Eclipse projects and responsible for ensuring multiple builds are working, Nick is also popular in the Eclipse blogging community where his posts are often in the form of music or poetry.
• Paul Fremantle Co-founder and CTO of WSO2, Paul has been praised for evangalising the Equinox platform and it’s use as part of an SOA platform.
• Mik Kersten A well known member of the community, and the face behind Mylyn and Tasktop, Mik has even earned a JavaOne Rock Star Hall of Fame award. His work with Mylyn has demonstrated the capabilities of the Eclipse platform to a wide audience.
• Tom Schindl Tom is Chief Software Engineer at BestSolution.at, and has been nominated for helping everywhere, across newsgroups, blogs and for hist work in presenting at Eclipse conferences. Tom is very involved in the e4 project, as well as Nebula and UFaceKit.
• James Sugrue James is the editor at EclipseZone, and works as a software architect at Pilz. As well as leading the revival of EclipseZone, writing articles and doing interviews with some of the community leaders, James has begun to get more involved in some Eclipse projects.

EPIC 2.0

Eclipse Plugin Central (EPIC) is the place people go to find stuff in the
Eclipse ecosystem.   It has over 1100 products listed and 60 service and training providers;  gets about 140K+ unique visitors a month and generates about 150-200K click thrus to the sites of the listed products.   EPIC is pretty successful.  The unfortunate thing is that EPIC is old; actually the content management system it uses is old.

For this reason we have decided to rewrite EPIC, lets call it EPIC 2.0.   At a basic level we will move the product listings to a system built on Drupal. We have been using Drupal for Eclipse Live and have been pretty happy with it.   However, we would like to go beyond just moving the basic functionality to Drupal.  I would like to revamp EPIC to take advantage of different social media features, maybe integrate some of the comments from Gorkem and Boris about ‘Eclipse needs a marketplace’.

We have started a list of initial requirements.  However, we need your help and good ideas that you would like to see in a new EPIC or Eclipse marketplace.   We have opened a bug to start collecting ideas.  Now is the time to start contributing those ideas.

Gov’t of Canada RFI for OSS

The Government of Canada has issued an RFI for information about No Charge Licensed Software; for some reason they needed to create a new term for open source software.  Since I am a Canadian, live in Ottawa and am very involved in OSS, I have been preparing a response to the RFI; which is due February 19.

Below are my response so far.  Please feel free to leave a comment, if you have any suggestions.

Q1. In the Overview, the Crown provided a definition for No Charge Licensed Software. Is this an appropriate definition?

There is an industry accepted definition of open source software provided by Open Source Initiative (OSI).  Open source software license specify re-distribution rights, availability of source code and other terms that are not necessarily specified in a ‘freeware’ license.  We would suggest not creating a new one.

For the remainder of this RFI we will refer to Open Source Software (OSS), not No Charge License Software

Q2. What are reasonable criteria that the Crown should consider in a decision process for acquiring No Charge Licensed Software?
Are there circumstances in which the acquisition of No Charge Licensed Software would not be advisable?

The Crown should continue to make technology decisions based on the ability of the proposed solution to meet the specified requirements and at an acceptable return on investment.   OSS should be considered as an option in this decision making process but only as a peer to commercial software.   We don’t believe special treatment should be given to OSS that is void of a solid return on investment analysis.

We don’t believe there are circumstances that OSS acquisition in not advisable.

Q3. What factors other than price should be considered as part of an evaluation guideline for No Charge Licensed Software? Are there other factors beyond those outlined in Appendix A & B that the Crown should consider?

Some other factors to consider are:

1)    Type of OSS license
2)    Diversity of the OSS project community
3)    Number of releases completed by the OSS project

Q4. How should existing Government Furnished Equipment, Services, Service Level Agreements and internal resources be considered when evaluating the usage of No Charge Licensed Software?

To acquire an SLA for an OSS project, the Crown would have to purchase an SLA from a vendor that provides support for the specific project.  This should be considered as part of the normal software procurement process

Q5. How practical is No Charge Licensed Software? Are there hidden costs that need to be considered as part of the process of evaluating the alternatives available?

OSS has proven to be very successful and widely used.  Linux, Apache, Eclipse, Mozilla are all examples of widely deployed and used OSS.   As with any software, there are extra costs associated with training, development, deployment, management and support.

Q6. What are the general financial, technical and security risks associated with acquiring and using No Charge Licensed Software?

An important consideration with any OSS is the sustainability and longevity of the community associated with the OSS.   An OSS project that has a small number of committers, does not appear to be widely adopted, very little traffic on the project mailing list or newsgroups, may send a signal that the project’s longevity may be in doubt.   The Crown should look for a large and diverse committer population.  Ideally those committers are from a variety of companies, to ensure that a single vendor does not control the project.

Q7. How do Open Standards and interoperability factor into evaluation considerations?

OSS has a history of driving the adoption of open standards.   When evaluating OSS the Crown should expect that the technology implements and interoperates with open standards. This is very similar to commercial software.

Q8. How does the technology factor into the evaluation consideration, such as ability to maintain and evergreen?

Not really sure how to answer this…..

Q9. How does the Crown evaluate the flexibility of the licensing models for No Charge Licensed Software?

When evaluating the different OSS licensing models, the Crown should consider the rights and obligations for re-distribution.   Some OSS licenses, like BSD, offer  re-distribution with no obligation.  Other OSS licenses, like GPL, offer re-distribution but obliged any derivative works to also be distributed under the GPL license.   If the Crown plans to use OSS in a Crown asset that requires re-distribution, then they need to assess the obligations of the license.

Q10. What impact will No Charge Licensed Software have on Government Licensed End-User Networks
(http://software.tpsgc.gc.ca//catalogue/index-e.cfm)

No idea how to answer this??

Recap of the Eclipse Banking Day in London

The Eclipse Banking Day in London last week was a great success. When we first started to plan for this event I did not know what type of response to expect. Based on the results of the event, I can definitely say Eclipse is very popular with the banks in London.

We had over 100 people registered and about 80-85 attended; 22 financial institutions were represented and as a nice surprise, 18 vendors that focused on the financial services market.

All of the speakers and sessions were great. We will be posting many of the presentations over the next couple of days on the event wiki.   Some of highlights were:

1. Tas Frangoullides session on describing Barclay’s initiative to use model driven development to implement SOA. Tas is an excellent presenter and the topic was very interesting. Barclay’s has created a toolkit that allows them to use Rational Software Modeler to model different web services and then automatically generate the web services using EMF, UML2 and WTP. They were able to prove their MDD approach when they were required to switch their enterprise service bus (ESB) 4 days before going live with a production system. It certainly sounds like a great use of Eclipse technology and a great case study of MDD and SOA.

2. Jeremy Nelson from JP Morgan presented their Eclispe RCP based OneBench platform for trading applications. JP Morgan has created a common platform that allows their development teams to plugin different trading applications. It is a nice example of creating an industry specific platform.

Besides the sessions, it was great to meet a lot of people at the event. There are certainly some interesting applications being built with Eclipse in the finance industry.  Thanks to everyone that attended and especially all the speakers.

I would also like to thank Actuate, Cloudsmith, itemis, WeigleWilczek and Sybase for sponsoring the event.  It was their support that made the event possible.

Open Source Executive Strategy Summit at EclipseCon

Last fall at Eclipse Summit Europe I was pleasantly surprised to talk to a number of companies that were formulating their open source strategy.  They has questions about different strategies and were interested in talking to people who have experience working in open source.  Near the same time, Matt Aslett from 451 Group published a very topical research note called ‘Open Source is Not a Business Model‘.  In the report, Matt presents a framework for an open source strategy and then a survey of how existing vendors map into the framework.

Based on these observations, there seemed to be an opportunity and a need to create a forum for discussion about what open source strategies are working today and what will work in the future.  Therefore, we at the Eclipse Foundation have decided to organize the Open Source Executive Strategy Summit.

The Summit is a 1 day event for business executives responsible for their organizations open source strategy.   The agenda features Matt Aslett of 451 Group,  Lawrence Rosen -respected expert on open source licensing, Paul Clenahan from Actuate and Jochen Krause from EclipseSource.   We will also have a closing panel titled ‘The Future of Open Source and Business’.

The Summit will take place March 26 in Santa Clara, CA the same location as EclipseCon.   Attendence is by invitation and is limited to executives responsible for an organziations open source strategy.    To request an invitation please e-mail strategysummit@eclipse.org.