Archive for the 'Eclipse' Category
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008
Hate to be the skeptic, but…
What does Microsoft gain from making these moves? If there’s anything about open source communities and technologies I’ve learned is that it’s imperative that you understand the motives, the context and the drivers of any vendors’ moves. I hate to be the skeptic, but I suspect Microsoft’s intentions are not pure. Warning phrases from Yoda come to mind… “Clear your mind must be, if you are to discover the real villains behind this plot.”
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/19/ramji_microsoft_open_source_strategy/
Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
Eclipse takes on Java and .NET with OSGi model for run time apps
Very cool news…
http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=2136&tag=nl.e622Â
Monday, February 11th, 2008
Top 50 proprietary applications and open source alternatives
A couple of these are dated (NVU…), but Jimmy Atkinson put together a great rosetta stone for those looking for open source alternatives to their proprietary desktop apps.
Friday, December 7th, 2007
Comparing “open source” projects? Start by asking why does the project exist.
I’ve thus far made no mention of OpenDS and the wildfire reporting that has ensued, but there was one aspect of this situation I commented on to Stephen O’Grady and others on #redmonk when it came out that bugged me. It was a question: “how did it ever get to this point?”. How does a company - a profit seeking company, not a wild tongued developer - even get into an OpenDS situation? I believe the answer is that many people have wrongly assumed that the label “open source” indicates a project is disentangled from corporate affairs. Let me explain.
It’s not my place to determine whether any of the current buzz words today that mingle corporate led open code projects under various licensing and governance constructs are “right” or “wrong”, but I do have a strong opinion that the independent open source projects often have a leg up in building communities, participation, and multi-vendor investment (and often that’s their goal). I also think it’s foolish to expect any single company, commercially led project should behave in any manner other than a commercial business driven by stockholders would. I’m not defending or accusing Sun or any of the OpenDS developers; I’m focusing instead on what fundamental misunderstandings of “open source” may have led to all the hype that’s ensued.
I’ll start by saying I believe the “open” in “open source” projects is not well defined consistently and so confusion abounds when people compare “open source” X project to “open source” Y project. The compare is flawed in that each project may have a completely different reason for existence. Commercially run open source projects are inherently different from non-corporate, multi-vendor, open collaboration projects. That does not mean one is more “evil”, “good” or “bad” but rather that they’re apples and oranges. However, for whatever reason, the ability to view code has led to people lumping them together in the same classification called “open source”.
Linux and OpenSolaris are so different, I cringe whenever I hear people compare them (and yet I get dragged into doing comparisons myself to prove it’s not proper). It’s not that any one approach is by definition right or wrong - they have different reasons for existence. I do believe strongly that “Linux” is a great approach for its community’s goals - but Linux starts with a community, not a vendor’s goals. And so it becomes an issue when you compare a commercially driven project to a community led project - the reason for their existence is entirely different. There are different situations and goals that warrant a different project governance, control, license, and decision making construct for these projects.
Look at Eclipse. For full disclosure, I work at IBM. I’ve also only been at IBM since 2005 so Eclipse “happened” before my time. While Eclipse’ roots trace back to IBM, I don’t believe IBM had a single product that used Eclipse when it was “open sourced”. Some intelligent visionaries at IBM saw that the world needed an extensible IDE and platform for building out the next generation of desktop applications. Eventually Eclipse added Eclipse RCP and today IBM has Lotus Notes, Symphony, Rational, WebSphere and probably other Tivoli and IM tools and products built on Eclipse. Adobe, BEA, Borland, Oracle, SAP (competitors) are all “Strategic Members” of Eclipse and all have products that use Eclipse code (as do many other commercial software vendors). Did IBM intend to make money on Eclipse itself or intend to help its software competitors with code?
What was IBM’s goal then? Could it have been to disrupt the status quo, to change the landscape, foster open standards, build an ecosystem of investors, and ultimately move the industry forward? (something even a vendor as large as IBM could not do alone) I think we all know the answer to that. Just look at the results: a huge membership of Eclipse.org - look at how many of these for profit companies are using Eclipse in their own products. Could Eclipse’ structure be anything other that what it is to have the same impact? I don’t believe so.
Very few Eclipse “members” actually make money on selling the Eclipse code itself - they generate revenue using Eclipse in their products and extensions of the code. These members also reduce cost through collaborative, community based shared development. There are economic drivers and business value moving Eclipse forward. The revenue has moved from selling the IDE or RCP code to selling ancillary products/services leveraging and extending the code. What part of Eclipse Foundation does IBM own and control at Eclipse.org? Answer: None. How many times does “IBM” appear in the Eclipse Foundation Governance Bylaws? Answer: 0. With this independence, the Eclipse community has chosen Eclipse’ future, moving towards the needs of member users, towards innovative new developments, and ultimately has created a very malleable, extensible codebase upon with hundreds (maybe thousands) of products rely - whether IBM liked it or not.
It amuses me to see the OpenSolaris community now in a riff over Sun naming the Project Indiana OpenSolaris distro… well… OpenSolaris (second time’s a charm?). As a corporate company can decide, Sun has chosen to own and control all of the copyright and trademark IP, the Solaris architecture decisions, governance appears to “report” to Sun, Even the OpenSolaris community’s “Constitution” mentions Sun Microsystems, Inc. and is marked with a Sun copyright at the bottom. Sun employees hold 6 out of the 7 Governance Board seats, and all of the opensolaris.org infrastructure is owned and managed by Sun. Anyone who does contribute code must first sign over copyright to Sun, the company. This is not “like Linux” at all and it irks me when people compare them as if they’re similar products that should be compared.
So what standing does any “community member” have to tell Sun not to name Project Indiana what Sun wants to name it? This is not a “Foundation” or independent not for profit project. Sun is ultimately in this to make money on the productization of Solaris (why… after two years are there no competing commercial *Solaris distros as we see with Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, Ubuntu, etc?). The only group with standing to tell Sun what to do is Sun’s stockholders. It could only have been delusion or sheer blindness that led some community members to overlook that OpenSolaris has a different reason for existence and hence differing goals and mission as something like Linux. You cannot and should not compare them and you absolutely should not assume one “should be” like the other.
Look at the results. Start with how many people have contributed code to OpenSolaris (and look at what they’re contributing if you have time). OpenSolaris is Sun’s own project - I can confidently state there is no outside development of any significant substance directing the architecture of Solaris / OpenSolaris different from what Sun the company would have done anyway. Two “community developers” (Juergen Keil and Richard Lowe) account for nearly 40% of all accepted contributions - just two developers. Only 84 developers have contributed anything at all - ever (including small typos fixes, accepted or not). Outside contributors must have a Sun employee review, approve and integrate their code. And after two years, it seems some are starting to just realize, this Sun controlled model may not be the best approach. Those who do suddenly “wake up” have been relying on a false assumption. They assume OpenSolaris exists for them or should be like Linux or some other “open source” project they know about - and the reality is, it never was. It’s all about Sun’s stockholders.
What about Linux? There are approximately 2,000 Linux kernel contributors to each release alone (this does not include the massive work going on above the kernel). Looking at the commercial contributors to Linux, you will find a “who’s who” of IT and electronics vendors (also take a look at the LF membership). With Linux, copyright of the Linux kernel code is retained solely by the authors, there are many non-profit foundations supporting the components of a Linux distribution, and because decision making is merit based by community members, no one company controls (or stops) what goes in. Step back to the start of Linux and it’s obvious the intent for this project’s existence was very different than Sun had for OpenSolaris.
So returning to the subject of the post, I have come to the conclusion that much of the “open source” hype and “hurt feelings” are rooted in fundamental confusion about what “open source” means especially in single-vendor led and controlled projects. The only reason anyone should be surprised by anything Sun does with OpenSolaris, OpenDS, or any of the other Sun open source projects it controls, is because that person has fundamentally created an expectation that access to source code meant more than just that - and that is a flawed assumption.
Commercially led projects are created for commercial reasons. “Community members” should not force their own expectations on these projects or they’re likely to see disappointment, frustrations, and unnecessary hype when the company does something counter to what is expected. The same holds true for other companies as well, including IBM. Consider this Q&A about commercial project expectations from Stephen O’Grady back in June:
Q: Do you think that this Open Commercial Development represents an ideal hybrid of open source and commercial development philosophies?
A: It all depends on your expectations. If the idea is that some of the benefits of open source - be they community QA and bug reporting, feature suggestions, and so on - will be realized via this model, then yes. If the intent, however, is to build a vibrant, open source style community, a la Eclipse, then the answer is no, it isn’t.
It all starts with having the right expectation. Is Sun at fault on anything with OpenDS or OpenSolaris? Hey, no one’s perfect, but who can know for sure? Some may point to poor communication of its intent and goals for the projects (and improper comparisons to Linux). Too often I see Sun executives trying to position OpenSolaris as “like Linux”, but those who do research and homework, will likely understand the reality the hype-driving-community often ignores. Is this the “holy grail”, “silver bullet” answer to squash the hype? Absolutely not; communities will speculate forever. However, it’s easier to stay out of the hype if your message is consistent and clear.
You might be wondering what kicked off this massive post today? The answer is odd, but it was a quote from Bruce Perens in an El Reg article. In case any of the above post left my position to question, I agree with Bruce and this quote seems a great place to end.
“In general open source is only going to work if you let it be a community led project. Sun has had a hard time learning this, and some of their open source projects have had a hard time getting outside contributors, because Sun has insisted on owning the whole thing,” Perens said.
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
Eclipse users are driven by…. surprise, surprise… Economics
URL: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2213907,00.asp
I tend to bring up economics in conversations about Linux and open source. I completed my undergraduate work in Economics so the bridge between the two topics comes rather easy. Economics is a key driving force behind what makes “open source” (software) fundamentally “work”. The “invisible hand” makes course corrections and drives investment from multiple parties, each investing for their own gain. Many point to open source as some weird form of technical socialism, and to some extent perhaps the community aspect and personalities lend help to that portrayal. However, at the root of open source I see free market capitalism. Someday, if I ever have the time, I’d love to write a paper (or blog) about the economic principles that we can see playing out in the open source software and Linux ecosystem. If you know of an economist who has written on the subject, I’d love any pointers to their research.
The survey, conducted by The Eclipse Foundation and market research firm IDC, found that 75 percent of the IT solution providers polled said they are using Eclipse for economic reasons—either to make money or to save money. Of the organizations using Eclipse to make money, 47 percent said they are making at least 50 percent of their revenue from Eclipse-based products.
Saturday, August 25th, 2007
Visual Studio to Eclipse - get comfortable making a transition
IBM DeveloperWorks is a goldmine for fabulous information - here’s a new Eclipse starter article for those coming from a Visual Studio .NET IDE environment.
I actually did quite a bit of .NET programming back in the day (even had a very popular tutorial up at DotNetJohn.com). Can you believe it? Anyway, transitioning from .NET to Java is a bit awkward, even worse is trying to understand a different worklow in Eclipse than what you’re used to in the VS environment. I think the brightest part of the Microsoft portfolio is the VS suite of tools - hands down. However, there are many issues outside of usability that tend to entice developers to drop VS and go somewhere else. If you’re a VS-oriented person and looking to dabble in Eclipse, this one is for you. I will admit up front, it’s VERY basic and if you’re looking for language-specific build or project management types of information, you may want to do a bit more searching on the site for deeper articles.
Monday, June 25th, 2007
Meme Games: 3×3 Lessons for Open Source Firms
I was tagged by Stephen O’Grady… while I generally avoid replying to such meme’s, I then saw Luis replied and that put the rest of us tagged on the spot ;-) I am also replying because I probably see a different side of the equation that could potentially help others understand how the IBM-like vendors look at open source firms. Hopefully there may be at least a small level of insight that someone can benefit from in this response. I’ll put the usual disclaimers around this - take it “as is” with no express or implied warranties for fitness for any particular purpose (or merchantability).
I will preface that this meme is about “open source firms” which I assume means companies/profit seekers leveraging open source software as a model to grow - not those who take on the humble task of building free software in a non-commercial intent model (i.e. Apache, Eclipse). Having replied to this meme, I get to name the next round of victims. For that I will now tag Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth, kernel hacker Gerrit Huizenga who participates uniquely with other Linux firms in the community, and finally sogrady’s partner in crime over at Redmonk, Coté. So without further adieu, here’s my quick/dirty 3×3.
3 “Do”s:
1) Do Bring Crisp Customer Value to the Table: Define a value proposition beyond simply relying on being “open source” - there has to be some reason your value proposition is better (i.e. Firms in your industry constantly struggle to integrate X and Y while customizing for individual business units. Our open, modular architecture can be adapted to meet your individual business unit CRM requirements and integrate with X without expensive, lengthy customizations of the entire app) Hitting on a pain point of “closed” alternatives works well too - ask a PBX user how much they love their supplier(s)… turn the pain points (licensing, payment models, etc) into your value prop
2) Do Make Friends, Not Enemies: I once had a _smart*_ once tell me in an opening introductory sentence at an O’Reilly event his job was to use open source to wipe out millions of dollars of IBM’s business until IBM realized they’d have to buy him. That was his first sentence to me ever! - not “Hi, I’m XYZ from ABC, I’d like to find ways to partner with IBM”. The IT business is driven by partnerships, friendships, loyalties, acquaintances, and networking. If you are into open source to make a profit, partner like mad - if you position yourself as the enemy, expect to be killed or worse, ignored and slowly put out to pasture. The person who approached me in that manner is now struggling with the latter issue… I suspect his initial investors won’t hang around long as he still tries to make himself relevant.
3) Do Make the Right Friends - Partner with the Right Partners: The open source firms with a strong management team “get” partnering. They partner with other firms that can enable business and community growth. Just because someone like IBM invests millions in open source communities, Linux, and the community does not mean every open source firm should bet the farm on partnering with IBM. Yes, partnering with IBM has advantages, but IBM can also suck up your precious resources simply navigating the huge array of virtual teams. IBM may also have a differing strategy (and every strategy out of IBM is not necessarily the one that wins in market - you can be different). As an open source firm, your goal is to find the right partners who are naturally aligned for partnering with you. Don’t accept partnerships that have no investment on one side - they’re doomed. Both sides must be aligned and invested. How will your partnership not only create more business for you, but also generate new revenue or reach a new customer base for your partners. I’ve had this discussion with the head a particular open source firm on a few occasions - partnering is by definition mutual - how do we both benefit from partnering? (otherwise, I can’t justify investment and maybe I’m not the right partner for you) Another IBM partner with an open source product just closed another round of investment for ~$25M - they know how to partner in a mutually beneficial model. There will be a lot of news coming in this space…
3 “Do not”s:
1) Do Not Shy Away from Being a Commercial Business - too often companies pitch how “open” they are. While that’s great, how do you make money? It’s as if some open source firms are afraid to discuss how they make money off of free software (free as in speech). This is usually a good way for vendors to weed out the bad firms - if the firm is shy about discussing this, they probably have a weak value prop, and there’s probably more of a “hidden hook” to make customers pay than offer something customers want to pay for. IBM has for a long time been investing substantially in Linux, open standards/source based software, and open source communities - I can’t recall an executive who did not clearly, up-front, and simultaneously articulate how IBM generates revenue from any of those ventures. If you set the tone up front, no one will be surprised or upset later. And if you have a strong value prop - see point 1) - customers will expect your valuable product/service comes at a reasonable price. And one last point is “free as in beer” only gets you one round - downloads do not magically turn into profit later. I don’t care if you have 8M downloads - while that’s great for showing loose interest in your technology, how many are paying you? How many have built a dependency in their applications on your technology? How are you going to generate the revenue needed to fund the next version of your technology?
2) [If you are trying to be the standard as in platform], Do Not Try to Control/Dominate/Dictate an “open” Community Project. I’m not talking about MySQL here - they’re an application/database component. Rather, think about platforms like operating systems, dynamic server languages, portable runtimes, etc. that customers use as platforms to build on. There are many of these succeeding today (RHT, NOVL, PHP, Apache, Eclipse to name just a few). There are others that may have an open source license, but the firm tries to dominate with restrictions and provisions in contributor agreements, including hidden hooks in license terms, or by bundling in non-free (as in speech) components. These firms typically then claim to be leaders and their platform is growing in adoption … yet for some reason… no one partners with them - see point 2) - and they carry the entire development expense with no community-scaling benefits. They invest the R&D and in the end, their “community platform” is just another vendor product that rings well with the vendors existing customers. Consider Eclipse - while it may have started with IBM dominating the “participant list”, it takes a serious approach to vendor-neutrality and open participation for BEA, Oracle, Sybase, Zend, Actuate, Compuware, SAP, CA, and Borland to all join IBM on the Strategic vendors list. The same applies to Linux - look at the Linux Foundation membership list.
3) Do Not Ignore Intellectual Property; Do Not Let Intellectual Property Stifle Your Innovation - First, you cannot ignore the effects and implications of intellectual property decisions. First, there’s the license - not all software must be GPL, but there are serious, practical issues if you decide to create the “XYZ Corp Open Source License v1.0″. License appropriately for the type of developer and user community you’re trying to foster. Second, patents - take a political stance, but don’t get caught staring at the clouds waiting for Congress. File for patents if you can, what you do with them after is up to you, but the Patent Commons, OIN, or some other entity is a great place to house them. Also, don’t be stupid and violate an obviously valid patent. If you’re starting an open source project in a technology area that has established players - hire an attorney to guide you through the minefield. It can be done. Third, figure out the trademark situation. Badgeware is one issue, but not creating a trademarked identity that your “open community” can use in viral marketing and “I’m proud to be an XYZ-user” situations is sheer nonsense. You need to establish legal trademarks, then set clear guidelines for trademark usage up front, make it open, and don’t use your trademark to make people pay you - IMO it’s a poor business practice and creates unnecessary frustration later on. And finally, don’t let IP hold you up. Everyone knows this field is wrought with nonsense and arcane approaches to IP. If you can create value, just hire a reasonable IP attorney to walk you through the field. Take some basic steps to be safe, but don’t spin wheels and tie up valuable resources trying to analyze (or let an attorney make you analyze) every conceivable, possible, extreme angle. IP generally comprises of Patents, Copyrights, Trade Secrets, and Trademarks - use them wisely.
If I had a 4×4 meme, I’d also cover open standards and the importance to lead in driving these open standards as part of your model (see what happened with Spring for instance).
Tuesday, May 15th, 2007
Reminder: An “open binary” license is by definition not an “open source” license
Some confusion seems to pop up here and there and sometimes we forget that not all “open” projects are truly 100% open source. Check if the open source licensed applications or products you’re considering are also partially covered by an “open binary license” b/c chances are, it’s not the same level of “open source” that you would expect from a Linux/Apache/Eclipse/WordPress/PHP/Mozilla project. Beware the branding of “open source” as many of the late comers to the game sometimes plaster everywhere - open binary does not necessarily represent everything you have come to expect from the established open source projects.
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007
eWeek’s Most Important Open Source Applications of All Time
http://www.eweek.com/slideshow/0%2c1206%2ca=206265%2c00.asp
Monday, April 23rd, 2007
Notes 8 on Linux open beta feedback
In the spirit of an open beta, here are some of my experiences/feedback re: Notes 8 client on Linux. In all fairness, my laptop is not the latest and greatest… so take performance comments for what they are on a Pentium-M 1.7 ghz w/1GB RAM (not core/core duo).
1) When logging in, Notes 8 spawns a slew of empty tabs for various applications (Contacts, Calendar, etc) - all you have to do is close them, but it’s annoying.
2) Notes 8 productivity editors are not up to OpenOffice functionality so I find myself almost exclusively reliant on OpenOffice. To set expectations, with MS Office, I’m one of the 5% who actually use 90% of the features of PowerPoint and Excel. I rarely used Access/Publisher/OneNote/Outlook.
I have seen the following:
- When opening a file from Gnome UI, Notes will launch an empty, new document - not the document I try to open.
- Formatting and styles: Notes 8 productivity editors do not render the same for ODP/ODT files as OO.org… can’t explain it but I have weird effects on margins, fonts, etc.
- Saving files: there is a limitation in the number of subfolders you can navigate to in the Save dialogs… granted it’s quite a few, but when you have an ntfs partition with quite a few subdirs, you can hit it….
- Master templates: um… where did they go…
- Fonts… fonts… fonts… need cross-OS common set of fonts.
3) Local / Server mail files: Notes 8 client always defaults to the server copy of your mail file - which is exhaustive and not quite as responsive as I’m accustomed to. I’d prefer one setting so I can set the default to the local copy (or I just haven’t found it yet…). In Notes 7/Windows I could right click to open the local copy…
4) Mail template: I think this is an IBM internal issue, but the public Notes client has a much better mail template than our internal users have for some reason… if you’re not an IBMer, you’re better off (weird…)
5) Performance & Archiving: Notes 8 client archives at a very slow pace - can take quite a while. In general Notes is a not exactly a lightweight sprinter (not specific to Linux), but I’m sure once the debug symbols are removed and beta code is put through the paces it will improve. The Sametime 7.5 native Linux client got a huge performance boost once it went gold.
6) Positive feedback: I love the new UI, it’s almost “non-IBM-ish”
7) Wish Notes 8 had true html email (xhtml compliant) features… the RSS feed list is non-useable but I suspect that may be because of my template…. not sure how this works yet. I’d prefer to have a full function RSS reader similar to the Notes mail application (this could be an awesome community project…)
8) Notes 8 client needs some sort of Database connections migration tool - very annoying to recreate all the connections again when coming from Windows.
9) Positive feedback: it’s native on Linux, that’s 1000% improvement.
10) Positive feedback: I haven’t had to boot into Windows for 28 of the last 30 days and of those 2 sad days, it was just to do a single/small task that for some reason I needed Windows (i.e. opening a PowerPoint to check fidelity and make sure it looked the same as in ODP).
Overall I’m quite pleased. I’d like to see Notes go further to extend beyond just an upgrade (i.e. better integration as a feed reader), but the new version definitely provides a great Eclipse based platform to build off of and get there.
Wednesday, March 21st, 2007
Notes 8 Performance Improvements on Linux Worth the Upgrade/Migration Alone
Notes 8 as a client on Linux is ridiculously fast - and I don’t have one of the bleeding edge laptops here. The early alpha I used was full of bugs and had all the debug code running. This beta is definitely not slow and it hands down outperforms Notes 6.5 on Windows in speed. Add in that it looks better, has better organization/customizations, and has a built-in SameTime plugin… quite a package. The RSS feed plugin needs some presentation work, but it’s nice to see it there. One of these days I’m going to time my morning bootup from start button to able to send an email in Notes/Windows and compare that to booting with Notes/Linux to give you a feel for the pain/frustration I go through every time I restart into Windows.
I actually cut over to RHEL5 Desktop (IBM’s latest Open Client offering) last night to get on a supported Notes OS and keep up with the latest releases. I’m quite impressed with the look, feel, and performance of RHEL5 Desktop. It’s FAR better than the RHEL4 WS (shudder) and I’m impressed enough so far to say it may just be better than SLED as well. I shouldn’t knock RHEL4 WS - it has been around forever, and it does what it was designed for well. It’s tough to say “it’s better” knowing SP1 for SLED is on the way with new improvements, but for a first release, RHELD is definitely nice. I’m not sure yet what happens to the pkg mgmt when you mix in the bleeding edge Fedora repos, but you can be sure I’ll find out soon. That’s one area where Gentoo excels and I have yet to find a distro to keep up - Ubuntu is the closest if you want my opinion, but .. try installing Beryl 0.2 on Feisty… see what I mean.
Yesterday over on #redmonk I got the news that yet another beta tester tried to run it on Ubuntu… unfortunately that is not one of the beta platforms supported. If you’re using Ubuntu and want to try it out, I’d suggest running the beta on RHEL/SLES in VMWare on Ubuntu. It won’t be the ideal experience, but that’s one way to get it working. I’ll ask around and see if there any .deb’s in the IBM locker for the beta…
Monday, March 19th, 2007
Adobe Apollo… trying to mimic Eclipse RCP?
Saw this today over at Reg Developer… sounds quite similar to Eclipse RCP doesn’t it…? More information on Apollo is available here. It’s built on a completely different technology base (all Adobe surprise surprise), but it’s interesting how Adobe seems to have absorbed the Eclipse RCP message to developers. Could this also signal cross-OS products from Adobe - or will they continue Win/Mac only? My ears perked up when I heard about the web based version of Photoshop… is it all coming together now?
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007
And speaking of Eclipse…
Did you ever wonder where all the pieces of the UI come from?
http://mea-bloga.blogspot.com/2007/03/dear-michael-scharf.htmlÂ
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007
Sun demands an IDE user recount …
From a vendor PoV for tracking and measuring yourself, Sun putting code in NetBeans to ‘phone home’ is a bit … wait isn’t NetBeans “open source”? How did that code get in there?
Using this technique to legitimize your open source project… that I’m not so comfortable with (so far). Open source projects tend to care about their users first and when they have a strong community, everyone tends to know it instinctively. 787 Eclipse plug-ins is huge and everyone knows there are many Eclipse users - without a ‘phone’ dialing home.
Should every project out there ‘phone home’? I use Eclipse, but honestly these days it’s maybe a few times a month - should Eclipse try this, I’d be counted as an active user. But that doesn’t show how much time I spend using Eclipse - so should the ‘Eclipse phone’ then start tracking the hours spent using Eclipse phoning home every minute? Should Apache start having every httpd server ‘phone home’ every day? Gnome? KDE? GnuCash? At what point does every app on your system start ‘phoning home’ just so some vendor can count you as a user?
I’m just raising more questions than answering and I know that, but I’m curious who in the NetBeans ‘open source’ developer community decided to propose this… I see there are 19 listed NetBeans “developers” but it’s unclear if they all work for Sun or someone else truly in the ‘open community’. I suspect NetBeans is exhibiting signs of vendor dominance and ‘phoning home’ is just an extension of that problem. Vendor independence explains why BEA, IBM, Zend, Borland, SAP and other competitors can come together on a common platform: Eclipse - and no one needs to ‘phone home’ to know this is working.
Imagine every Eclipse RCP app phoning home - every Notes 8, Sametime 7.5 user…
Saturday, January 13th, 2007
Eclipse Joins JCP, OSGi, and OMG
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2082418,00.asp?kc=EWEWKEMLP011307BOE1
Will be interesting to see what happens with JCP and OSGi…
Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007
EclipseWorld Call for Speakers
http://www.eclipseworld.net/speakers.htm
CALL FOR SPEAKERS
Submission Deadline: April 13, 2007
EclipseWorld is a technical conference for enterprise IT software development professionals and managers using Eclipse-based technologies. Developers who attend EclipseWorld are real-world practitioners. They are looking for information on applying Eclipse-based tools and techniques to real-world projects.
Friday, December 15th, 2006
El Reg interview with Mark Anders (Flash, ASP.Net fame)
You all may find this interesting as well. I haven’t tried out Flex Builder yet… will need to find a demo somewhere.
http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/12/15/mark_anders_flash/Â
There’s a ringing endorsement for Eclipse built into this too:
Microsoft isn’t doing that [cross platform support] with Windows Forms and Rotor is just nothing – because I knew how it was built. That was kind of surprising. Even if I liked .NET more than I liked Java and even if I thought there were some better features in .NET, and I liked C# as a language - if you’re building a tool .NET has nothing for you. And the problem is not the syntax of the classes or the performance or that it gives me a nice Windows native UI. It’s just Eclipse is an incredible framework for building tools.
Tuesday, September 19th, 2006
DeveloperWorks: RadRails and Eclipse
Looking at RoR but want a familiar Eclipse IDE to work in? Take a look here.
Saturday, September 9th, 2006
IBM Offers Eclipse Support
Sounds funny… as if IBM wasn’t doing enough with Eclipse already. But now, based on customer demand IBM is offering paid support options for the Eclipse tools themselves - yep, not just the Rational tools that are built on Eclipse. $400/developer/yr isn’t that bad a price either - especially for unlimited calls.
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1578418743;fp;4;fpid;1968336438
From the article:
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“This is an opportunity for the IT managers and development managers to provide a unified support structure,” Hebner said. Eclipse users not working with IBM Rational products also can sign up for the Eclipse support.
IBM officials noted users are doing mission-critical work and want more accountability for support rather than just relying on the community at large.
“They’re happy with the level of tooling [from Eclipse]. They’re not happy with building [solutions] alone,” said Gary Cernosek, offerings manager for analysis, design and construction at IBM Rational.
Thursday, September 7th, 2006
eWeek wises up to Eclipse
I need to get a del.icio.us plugin up and running for these… but in the meantime:
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