We are getting ready to celebrate Eclipse’s 5th birthday. I am curious what people think are the important events in the history of Eclipse. Maybe a key release, important article or white paper, conference, what else?
Considering, I am a relative newcomer to the Eclipse community, it would be great if some of the oldtimers (and newcomers) would share their perspective?
Ian Skerrett 
formation of the foundation, for one.
The 3.0 refactoring making RCP apps possible.
5 years? eclipse is much older than that. It’s open source for 5 years now..
The key event is making it open source 5 years ago.
Michael
– eclipseCon 2004, the first official conference on eclipse and advertised as such
– move to OSGi
– 3.0 look
The 2.0 release. The first official release developed with feedback from the open source community 🙂
Then, of course, the birth of Planet Eclipse.
The release of Eclipse 2.1 with support for running on the Mac for the first time. Also, the release of IBM’s WebSphere Studio 4.0, which was the first commercial Eclipse system.
Here’s one for you. On July 17, 2002, QNX hosted the first CDT Summit. It was attended by representatives from Rational (which became part of IBM shortly after), Red Hat, MontaVista, and of course QNX. The topic was the release of CDT 1.0 based on QNX’s contribution and what people wanted to work on after that. I have pictures and that the original slide presentation that Sebastien Marineau gave. We shared it with the gang at the lastest CDT Summit a few weeks ago.