Thank you to the ALM Connect and EclipseCon Program Committee

The ALM Connect and EclipseCon schedule and sessions have been announced. As you would expect, the content looks excellent and we are set for another great conference.

It takes a lot of time to put together the program, so I would like to thank the PC chairs John Arthorne (EclipseCon) and Dave West (ALM Connect), plus their committee members for all the time they spent recruiting, reviewing and debating which talks to include.  I think the results speak for themselves!

EclipseCon PC Members

• John Arthorne (Chair)
• Cédric Brun
• Doug Schaefer
• Gunnar Wagenknecht
• Ian Bull
• Kevin Sawicki
• Lars Vogel
• Sven Efftinge

ALM Connect PC Members

• Dave West (Chair)
• Dominique Toupin
• Kenn Hussey
• Mik Kersten

As a reminder, this year we have reduced the prices to attend ALM Connect and EclipseCon. If you register before December 31, 2012 it is only $800 to attend. We also have a limited number of non-corporate passes for only $500. If you are paying the fee yourself, we have made it a lot easier for you to attend.

ALM Connect and EclipseCon Call for Papers: Deadline Coming Soon

      

 

The ALM Connect and EclipseCon Call for Papers deadline is less than 2 weeks away. We have some great submissions already but we want to see a lot more. The official call for papers provides all the detail but there are some areas where I’d like to see even more content.

1. ALM Connect was a great success last year, so we are doing it again. The goal of ALM Connect is to have sessions that cover all aspects of the software development lifecycle: tools, methodologies and people. The sessions don’t need to be specific to Eclipse but we certainly have a lot of Eclipse projects relevant to the software lifecycle. I think it would be great to have sessions on Gradle, Maven, Sonar, Scrum, Kanban, PLM, Requirements management, testing, continuous deployment, devops, etc. and I expect to see sessions on Mylyn, Tycho, Git, Hudson, Gerrit, etc.

2. Eclipse 4 will be an important topic for EclipseCon 2013. Tell us how you are using it to build your application or what are the best steps to migrate an RCP application based on 3.x to 4.2.

3. New speakers. I’d love to see new people talking at EclipseCon. If you have never had the opportunity, please please send us a proposal.  We love to hear new ideas.

The great thing about Eclipse is that it is a diverse community so any topic will be of interest to the EclipseCon program committe. If you have something interesting to say, let us know your idea.

The deadline for submission is November 19, 2012.  We typically get more than half our submissions in the last week but why not submit this week  to beat the rush.

Good Governance of Open Source Projects

The topic of good governance for open source projects is something I think is really important for the long-term success of any open source project. In an effort to describe some of the best practices, I have written a guest blog post for the Open Source Delivers blog.

For a quick summary, the key points I see for good open source project governance are:

1.  Complete transparency: Make sure all the key rules and processes are written down
2.  Vendor neutrality: No one entity should have special status or decision making capability
3. Appeal to multiple stakeholders: Healthy open source projects have multiple stakeholders, so the governance needs to have a representation for each stakeholder
4. Separation of Church and State: Project development decisions need to be made by project committers not a ‘higher’ authority

Check out the details on the Open Source Delivers blog. Let me know if I have missed something or what you think.

Announcing Eclipse Day at the Googleplex, 2012 Edition

Google is a great supporter of Eclipse and open source in general. Therefore, I am always thrilled to have the opportunity to organize a new Eclipse Day at the Googleplex. This will be the fifth year we have organized the event and each year it proves to be a great learning experience. As always, we appreciate the support and sponsorship provided by the Google Open Source Program Office.

The 1-day event will be held on December 12 at the Googleplex. We have a great line-up of speakers from Eclipse projects and Google projects. This year there is a $40 registration fee that will be a Friend of Eclipse contribution to the Eclipse Foundation. In the past, registration was free but we had a high number of no-shows so we decided to make it a bit more of a commitment than just signing up online.

We are also organizing an Ignite session to showcase what people are doing with Eclipse. If you have some ideas, please send me an e-mail.

Looking forward to seeing everyone at the Googleplex on December 12. Remember to register today. Each year this event sells out.

Mea culpa: Why Eclipse Marketplace stats have gone way up

Some people might have noticed the download numbers for some of the more popular products on Eclipse Marketplace have taken a huge jump. For instance, Maven Integration for Eclipse has jumped to over 30,000 successful installs per month from the typical 6000-7000 installs per month.

We first discovered the large jump when we migrated Marketplace to Drupal 7. All of a sudden a lot of the more popular plugins were becoming a LOT more popular. It turns out for the last year we had been under-counting the installs, especially for the more popular plugins.

We use Varnish cache in front of Marketplace to cache a lot of the content. Unfortunately, Varnish was caching the url we used to count a successful install.  The cache was cleared every 5 minutes, so the successful install counter was incremented only once every 5 minutes. For popular plugins, like Maven integration, this had a significant impact.

The good news is we have fixed the problem and the stats now provide a more accurate picture of reality. It also means we are seeing each month close to 300,000 successful installs of Eclipse plugins!

New Lower Prices for EclipseCon NA

One of our goals for EclipseCon NA 2013 is to make it accessible to more people. Over the past number of years we have heard from individuals and companies that would have like to attend but the registration price was too high. Therefore, I am thrilled that this year we have been able to reduce the early registration price (before Dec. 31) to just $800. Last year the price was $1345, so we have dropped this price 40%!

We have also introduced a non-corporate price for individuals who are paying to attend out of their own pocket. If you can’t convince your company to pay, you can purchase an all-access badge for just $500. We hope this will allow even more individuals to attend. There is a limited number of passes available at the non-corporate prices, so register early.

As in past years, we are also looking for a number of student volunteers and we have a student price of just $400.

To reduce the prices we have had to make some changes to the conference. Returning attendees will notice that breakfast will no longer be served and there won’t be a dinner reception on Wednesday evening. There are lots of restaurants close to the hotel so attendees will have an opportunity to explore the area. We have also reduced the member/alumni discount to $100 (from $250) and decreased the rate for group discounts.

Registration is now open for EclipseCon NA 2013. I hope a lot more people are able to take advantage of the lower prices and attend EclipseCon NA. As a reminder, the conference call for papers is now open. We want to hear from everyone that has an interesting speaking proposal.

Eclipse Finance Day in Zurich

We are very pleased to announce the Eclipse Finance Day in Zurich on October 16, 2012.  Eclipse is used by some major financial institutions so this event is a great opportunity for individuals working in the finance industry to share best practices and network with their peers.  We have speakers from UBS, Credit Suisse, PostFinance, Swiss Mobiliar, Swiss Post, Basler and other organizations. We also have Eclipse experts Ed Merks, Christian Campo and Benjamin Muskalla speaking.  The agenda is really pretty amazing.

UBS is hosting the day long event at their office in Zurich.  There is no cost to attend but you do need to pre-register.  If you work in the finance industry, use Eclipse and live reasonably close to Zurich, I’d encourage you to attend.