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blog:eclipse_10_year_retrospective_and_challenge [2012/05/18 17:11]
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blog:eclipse_10_year_retrospective_and_challenge [2014/10/17 22:08] (current)
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 +====== Eclipse 10 year Retrospective and Challenge ======
 +
 +On his blog, [[http://​ianskerrett.wordpress.com/​2011/​10/​04/​when-did-you-join-the-eclipse-community/​|Ian Skerrett invites people to comment on when/how they joined Eclipse]]. ​ As I responded, I found I was sort of writing an Agile Retrospective. ​ Since those thoughts felt like they might be valuable on a larger scale, I am repeating them here.
 +
 +I became a member of the Eclipse Consortium during the year that we were creating the Foundation. I will never forget the Consortium’s last meeting held at the American Airlines conference facility in Dallas where the mood was festive because we had done what we set out to do–we had created the Eclipse Foundation and we were officially handing the keys to Eclipse over to them.
 +
 +My official job was to represent a small software development company that made a good living adding value to IBM’s iSeries tooling built on top of Eclipse. Unofficially,​ I became a voice for many small companies and especially for the community of open source developers.
 +
 +This led to interesting opportunities:​ One was the opportunity to negotiate on a conference call with the big company lawyers about how the patent retaliation clause in the EPL would work out in practice for software developers. Many software developers have a very negative view of corporate lawyers, but these were clearly on our side, had a clue, and were a joy to work with. On the other hand, I had a very engaging conversation with Richard Stallman about the relationship between Free Software and Open Source (and Eclipse in particular) when the Free Software community urged us to make the EPL compatible with the GPL.
 +
 +(Over the years, Eclipse has truly attracted some of the best of the best minds I have ever worked with.)
 +
 +In the end, the EPL and GPL have managed to coexist inside Linux distributions,​ and I personally appreciate both the passion of the hard-core Linux community and the powerful pragmatism the Eclipse community had when it created a truly symbiotic relationship between big corporations and open-source.
 +
 +In my own view, it is this powerful pragmatism combined with open-source symbiotic coopetition that has made, and continues to make the Eclipse community great.
 +
 +Looking forward, I believe that the biggest challenge Eclipse (and, indeed all of Java) faces is that we are hitting the complexity wall of what can be done with the Java language. OSGi goes a long way toward helping on one front. EMF helps a lot on another.
 +
 +The challenge I would put before the community today is to embrace and incorporate the emerging agile/​functional languages like Scala, Groovy, JRuby fully into the Eclipse, Modeling, and OSGi ecosystems.
 +
 +This will continue to ensure that the small developer with the New, Cool idea has a powerful enough lever that we will continue to see awesome ideas like Mylyn and many of the EMF ideas sprout, take hold, and grow up within the Eclipse ecosystem.
 +
 +~~LINKBACK~~
 +~~DISCUSSION:​closed~~
  
blog/eclipse_10_year_retrospective_and_challenge.txt · Last modified: 2014/10/17 22:08 (external edit)