Eclipse Members Meeting 2007

We finished up the Eclipse Members meeting for another year. The meeting was held in Chicago this year. With our commitments of the Eclipse board meeting on Wednesday, we attended the members meeting on Thursday.

We started the day with Mike Milinkovich (Executive Director) reviewing the Eclipse Foundation staff (17 people) and introducing the two new employees:
Gabe O'Brien - Darn good programmer working in Portland
Barbara Cochrane - IP Management working in Ottawa.


We all had a look at the download statistics.
The new Eclipse packages have significantly increased number of downloads with the expected spike for the Europa coordinated release.

China has continued to be the country with the highest percents of downloads at 21% followed by United States and Germany.

We reviewed the Strategy Update. The new items going forward:

• foster OSGi based tun time platform for applications.
  
• increase divesity and transparency in the projects. Focus on creating a community of innovation.
  
• encourage improved usability and out of box experience in the projects.
  
• make IP leadership a competitive advantage for the Eclipse community.
  
• implement programs for university outreach.
  

We walked through the IPZilla improvements and these are detailed in another post.

Old news to us on the board but the Q3 update for the board of directors included the approval of new trademark guidelines by the board and the creation of the IP working group.

There are lots of conferences on the horizon including:
Expect 400 attendees

Expect 400 attendees with possibility of numerous remote attendees via online linkup.

EclipseCon 2008. March 17-21, 2008 San Jose, CA
Call for papers opens October 16; Deadline is November 19. Expect 1500 attendees.

Looking ahead the Foundation is busy planning for EclipseCon, working on the improvements for IP process, planning for Ganymede.

Some areas specifically called out for opportunities to get involved were the Babel translation project and the Eclipse UI working group.

Bjorn Freeman-Benson (Director, Open Source Process) presented on the current reality of the Eclipse Development Process and the tweaks that are required to keep the reality matching the written process. The EDP needs to codify what we the community think is important and what we are willing to enforce for the good of the community.
Successes include the Architecture council mentoring of new Eclipse projects, the project release reviews and the open and transparent committer elections.

Bjorn reiterated that the goal of the EDP is reality not fiction.

One suggested tweak is to move the EDP to encourage diversity goals and that projects should strive to have diversity instead of the current wording where projects must have goals and are required to have diversity.

We received project updates from Bjorn on the most recent and interesting state changes of some of the over 80 projects within Eclipse. Bjorn also indicated the plan to have project dashboards - to provide even more useful information for community.

The new Eclipse members were introduced. Check them out:
Webtide - scalable AJAX and comet; core developers of jetty

Replay Solutions: tools that plug into Eclipse - capture and replay bugs

Ian Skerrett (Director, Marketing) presented the marketing update Q3/2007. We had 59 blogposts from the Europa review contest...and all of the reviewers got shirts. Planning on more and similar "promotions" in the future.

At both the board meeting and the Members meeting we had several "outside" presentations. All were thought provoking.

Matt Lawton, IDC presented on "Generating Revenue with Open Source Software".
Companies must now compete on their business model and there is lots up for grabs.
Last year there was 1.8 billion from standalone OSS revenue and this projected to 5.8 by 2011 with a growth rate higher than that of traditional software revenue growth.

Tony Bailetti from Carleton University was all about "Making money from OS".
Companies need to be clear on how they will make money from OS
Make money from OS template
- increase buyers willingness to pay for companies offers
- increase size of market
- decrease buyer willingness to pay for competitors
- decrease suppliers coast of working with you

We then did an impromptu case study of Innoopract via Jochen Krause reviewing a simplistic model of Innoopract's business and how it mapped to the template.

We ended our work at this gathering with a committer breakout session. We had a great question and answer period with Bjorn as the Eclipse Development Process expert, Janet Campbell (Legal Counsel & Manager, Intellectual Property) as the IP expert and all the committer representatives providing some wisdom from the trenches. Great practical application and exchanges to round out the day.

More meeting information can be found here.

We can look forward to seeing the members / committers at the meeting next year. Hope you can join us!

IP Process Update: IPZilla Improvements

The Eclipse foundation staff, the Eclipse board and your humble committer representatives have been hard at work improving the tools and interactions that implement parts of the Eclipse intellectual property (IP) process.

An IP Process working group has been tasked by the board to suggest and follow the changes being made by the Eclipse foundation staff.

The current set of improvements being worked on:

• a portal based contribution questionnaire that will drive a simplified workflow for committers to submit an IP contribution questionnaire (CQ) into IPZilla.


• quick action buttons to do the work for you for common workflows.


• Automatic code scanning with a keyword scan tool...looking for those pesky swear words, derogatory comments and "problem" indicator words.


• IPZilla now has project incubation status indicated in the request as well as some helpful canned work queue queries. The little egg is everywhere!

Other improvements that are planned in the shorter term include more workflow improvements, better emails (unique style and better wording) as well as reminder emails when progress has been halted on a specific CQ awaiting input.

Long term we can hope to see an implementation of an attachment / JAR scanner to really help the committer understand what kind of crazy nested hierarchy is in that JAR file.
Also planned is the automatic notification of projects that have requested usage of a JAR when a new version of the JAR has been approved for general usage. We can also hope to see the real requester of the CQ displayed in IPZilla.