Videos from Eclipse Day at the Googleplex

The videos from the Eclipse Day at the Googleplex event have now been posted on YouTube.

Thanks again to the Google Open Source office for making these recordings available.

Enjoy.

Eclipse @ eBay (the first couple of minutes is an introduction by myself but then Michael Galpin starts talking)

How Mylyn Changes the Way I Develop

Tools Make the Difference: GWT in Eclipse

Plug-in Development Tips and Tricks

Wiring Hacker Synapses

A Java Rock Star

Congratulations to Mik Kersten for being inducted into the JavaOne Java Rock Star program.   The Java Rock Stars are the top speakers, as voted by the attendees, at JavaOne.   Mik session was an introduction to Eclipse Mylyn and it seems like he and Mylyn were a great hit.   Mik is a great presenter, so it is no surprise but it is nice to see him being recognized.

The License Decision for the Symbian Foundation - or …

Or I was going titled this blog ‘The GPL is Not a Solution for World Peace’ but I didn’t.

Last week’s big news was that the Nokia is going to buy outright Symbian and then open source the Symbian operating system under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) and start the not-for-profit Symbian Foundation. Luckily we have analysts like Stephen O’Grady from Redmonk that provides a detailed and insightful analysis of the announcement.  However, I was surprised how Nat Torkington’s post regarding Symbian’s license decision misses the mark on the importance of licenses in the growth of platform ecosystems.

Nat’s basic argument is Linux under GPL has:

Essentially, the Linux kernel developer community is the Christmas Truce for the Unix platform developers–a place where they cooperate rather than compete … because the license dictates that they do it.

and that because Symbian under the EPL and Google Android (under APL) allow for proprietary extensions so:

I think this will slow down the success of their platforms and means neither will unlock the true potential of an open mobile platform. I believe true demilitarized openness is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for open mobile platform success.

I think Nat gives far too much credit to the selection of the GPL to the success of Linux.   The choice of license is just one component to a successful platform; more important is the governance of the platform.  Linux is successful and a place to cooperate because it is a vendor neutral community.  No one vendor has control over the Linux kernel, so it is a safe choice for multiple vendors and developers to participate.  If Linux was controlled by a single vendor, say Red Hat, then I highly doubt IBM, Novell, Canonical, Monta Vista, etc would participate in the evolution of the kernel.

A successful platform needs a vibrant ecosystem of individuals and vendors that provide products and services that add value to the platform.    The key to  enabling this ecosystem is an ‘Architecture of Participation‘ where vendors or individuals, can innovate, contribute and profit from providing value to the platform.   To enable this level of participation there needs to be a well defined component model that allows for extensions by the community.  If this is the case, then commercial products are just one way to participate and can in fact accelerate the success of a platform.  Profitable vendors have a reason to invest in the success of the base platform.

Nat is correct that for Symbian to be successful, they need to reach out to a wider community of developers and vendors to support their platform.  However, the GPL is not going to force vendors to embrace Symbian or create ‘a truce’.  What Symbian needs to enable is:

1) a vendor neutral governance model that allows for multiple competing vendors to collaborate

2) an Architecture of Participation that includes a common component model that is used for extensions.

These factors are what will drive the cooperation and collaboration on the Symian platform.  The formation of the Symbian Foundation is one important step in that direction but the execution of the governance will be important to watch.  As Stephan O’Grady mentions:

what is the governance model? Who will have the right to commit code? How will that list be managed and grown? How will the project manage to rapidly innovate without compromising the stability necessary to handset devices?

Symbian’s selection of the EPL provides them an opportunity to reach the greatest number of ecosystem participants.   Lets see how they do with the execution on the other factors.

Ganymede on Twitter

As we all know Ganymede is out.  Congrats to everyone involved.

I’ve been following the Ganymede buzz on twitter via summize; lots of positive chatter.  It looks like @lylo can claim credit for the first tweet about getting Ganymede but I am impressed that @llun did a blog post about the packaging site being down for about 5 minutes, while it was being update.   People are certainly excited about getting Ganymede.

Thank You Google

The Eclipse Day at the Googleplex was a great success.  Around 100 individuals attended and all the feedback I received was very positive.  The speakers were all top notch and there were lots of insightful questions from the audience.  It was a great combination!

I especially want to thank Google for being a wonderful host.   The Google Open Source Program Office were the sponsors of the event and they did a first class job.

Thank you also to all the speakers and attendees.   I hope we can make this an annual event!

Ganymede Demo Camps

Next week I get to attend two Ganymede Demo Camps.  The first being the Eclipse Day at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA.  Unfortunately, the event is full so we are not accepting any more registrations. The second demo camp will be on Thursday here in Ottawa.  We still have lots of room for demos and attendees at the Ottawa Demo Camp, so sign-up now.

In fact, next week there are a number of Demo Camps around the world.  Check out the complete list and sign-up to attend.  It is a great way to meet other people who are doing interesting things with Eclipse.

btw,  the Hyderbad Demo Camp is also full too.  Looks like that they have close to 100 people signed up.  Congrats to Progress Software and Hysea for organizing it.  What a great community event.  Someday I hope I can attend an Eclipse event that you guys are organizing. 

Global System Integrators Participation in Open Source

Matt Assay recently covered the Accenture / SpringSource announcement about Spring Batch.  Matt is absolutely correct in pointing out that the real news is that Accenture is actively and publically helping to support SpringSource in the project.  This is really great news and I hope to see more.

However, the question is how can open source projects engage with the large Global SI’s, like Accenture, IBM Global Services, EDS, etc. Like Matt, we know they are big users of Eclipse but there are not many examples of them participating in Eclipse  (btw, there might be but I can’t think of any now).  I think a closer partnership would be a win-win for both Eclipse and these organizations.   It would increase participation, drive additional innovation for enterprise users and drive down costs.   So how can we get more of these organizations involved?  Any thoughts/comments would be welcome.

Burton Group OSGi Survey Results

Kirk Knoernschild from Burton Group has published the results to an informal survey he fielded on OSGi usage.   I don’t think Kirk or anyone would claim this is a statistically significant survey or the sample was unbiased but I do think it raises some interesting results.

• The majority of people are using OSGi for Web applications.   This actually surprises me since I thought most OSGi usage was in the embedded space and and maybe rich client (ie Eclipse RCP).  However, this is great news for things like RAP and server side Equinox
• No surprise that ‘understanding how to use it most effectively’ is the greatest challenge.  As Alex said a great opportunity for a book and training.   We also need to make sure we provide great documentation for Equinox.
• It is interesting that a large majority would consider deploying their software as OSGi bundles.  I have often wondered if people will use OSGi as a programming model or use some higher level model on top of OSGi.  It would seem there is interest in using OSGi as a programming model.
• Equinox seems to be well known and adopted to those that are using OSGi.  However, it is apparent that the other OSGi implementations such as Felix and Knopflerfish are receiving attention.   We need a healthy number of OSGi implementations to create a market, so this is a good thing.  Of course, I hope Equinox continues to be the dominant choice for deployments. 

Kirk’s conclusions are also on the mark, we need more vendors with a clear and public OSGi strategy to accelerate enterprise adoption and OSGi will have its place in the next generation application platform.

Some interesting stuff and I hope Kirk and the Burton Group keep sharing these types of results.

Ganymede RC4 Packages Now Available

Ganymede RC4 packages are hot off the press and available for download.

btw, do you want to be at the front of the line to download the final Ganymede release? Denis is going to allow Friends of Eclipse early access to the Ganymede download server while the mirrors are synchronizing.  So, if you want about a 24 hour jump on downloading Ganymede, think about joining these people and becoming a Friend of Eclipse

CodeWarrior Tools Move to Eclipse

Freescale has announced they are moving their CodeWarrior tools to Eclipse.   It is great news to have Freescale actively participating in the Eclipse community and specifically on the DSDP project.   Eclipse is definitely the common development platform for tools in the embedded industry.