I’ve seen a lot of interesting stuff as of late that relates to Eclipse technology being used in academia. For example, Ugo Sangiorgi has been working on a position paper around the Sketch project for FlexiTools 2010.
Another cool Eclipse-related academic item I just saw was Code Bubbles. I also know that GEF3D has done some work in academia. Heck, the Mylyn project got its start as an academic project for awhile. I wonder if there’s something more we can do to make it easier for academia to participate in the Eclipse ecosystem and benefit from it. Here are some ideas that popped out in my mind…
- Should we have closer ties to academic conferences
- How about a list of all academic publications that use Eclipse technology
- How about having an “open source technology incubator” that lets people take a project and build a business (e.g., Mylyn -> Tasktop)
- Amend EclipseCon to accept position papers and have them published in a Eclipse focused academic journal
For those living in academia, what do you think? What would benefit you?
It’s interesting to hear that Liferay switched to the LGPL recently.
On top of that, they did the license switch in a way that involved their community (which is a good thing and should be noted by other companies looking to do the same thing). Anyways, there’s interesting discussion in why they did it and also people’s reactions in the comments are always fun to read…
Well, it’s a legitimate detriment to us. Our company has a policy preventing the incorporation of any open source product licensed under GPL or LGPL in any of our products. Irrespective of one’s opinion as to the wisdom or necessity of this, there are many organizations that have similar policies.
Sad that many companies still have this policy…
On a side note, maybe my prediction about the rise of weak copy left licenses has some merit?
As of late, I’ve been helping a couple new Eclipse.org projects prepare for creation and release reviews. As an Eclipse.org project, you have to follow the Eclipse Development Guidelines. A part of that process is doing scheduled reviews when you’re ready to release. To make the review process a bit easier for some folks, I’ve created some unofficial templates on Google Docs you can use (just search Google Doc templates for ‘Eclipse.org‘ and you should find them).
On a side note, if you’re a project lead, a good place is to go to Eclipsepedia for information about the review process.
Hope you find this information useful.
Last weekend, a bunch of friends and I crammed into a couple vans and participated in the Texas Independence Relay. The 203.20 relay race started in Gonzales, Texas…
We ran throughout the beautiful Texas countryside… town to town…
I only managed to get two legs in before my IT band said no more. I’m pretty sure this injury was a result of the Austin marathon and over-training… I plan to switch to the bicycle for the next few weeks while I recover. Thankfully, my awesome team managed to pick up the rest of my legs. We eventually made it to the Houston downtown area…
In the end, we managed to get to the San Jacinto Monument in 24:59:10!
I believe we placed in the top 5, but I’m not sure. I’ll know when the final results are posted from the race. On the whole, I highly recommend anyone who wants to do a relay race to do the TIR, there’s no better way to explore the Texas country side.
My favorite time of year is about to start soon when it comes to open source development, Eclipse’s involvement with the Google Summer of Code (GSOC) program.
All people involved in the Eclipse community should post their ideas here. It’s a good time to start posting ideas, as students will start looking at mentoring organizations in mid March.
There is little downside in participating in this program in my opinion. As an Eclipse.org GSOC mentor, you get the rewarding opportunity to mentor a student in the ways of Eclipse and open source. As a student, you get Eclipse experience and paid for your contributions!
In the end, the whole open source community benefits.
How exciting to finally have the Equinox and OSGi book done (see the book review from DZone). In the Eclipse community, many people complain about the lack of documentation and reference material, well that should be less of a problem given the book and excellent Toast example.
You can download the first chapter for free (and the 6th chapter).
I may be a bit biased (see the kind words about me in the Acknowledgments section of the book), but I believe this is the most comprehensive book on OSGi out there. The authors have many years of practical OSGi experience, from the days to when OSGi wasn’t cool yet (SMF) to when it became the basis of Eclipse. On top of that, I think the best thing that comes out of this book is the open sourced Toast example. Expect to see a lot us within the Eclipse community use this example when we talk about OSGi, Equinox and EclipseRT.
So what are you waiting for, go buy the book and learn about OSGi.
Are you attending EclipseCon 2010?
Does snacking on all that conference food (think chocolate fountains) make you feel guilty?
Want to improve your 5K time 
?
Well, I have good news. This year, EclipseSource has graciously sponsored the EclipseCon Exercise event. To attend, please register on the wiki and let the event organizers know that you’re coming. This year, we have something special for the runners due to sponsorship, technical tees!
Anyways, I want to continue the tradition of morning exercise during the conference and I hope to see some fresh faces this year in the morning. There really is no better way to start off your morning than running through some fresh California air.
I was introduced to Fat Bet recently.
I have a couple colleagues participating in a “fat bet” and I’m a bit surprised with their progress. The way it works is you simply wager some money and set weight targets amongst a group of friends. You track the progress of each other online and in the end, the person that reaches their target first will win the most money in the pot. As a bonus, if you’re a spectator to the bet, you get an overview of everyone’s progress via a console…
If you dive deeper, you can see a graph of how close people are to meeting their targets…
So far it seems to be working well. There’s also a comedic bonus of hearing about your colleagues trying to sabotage each other’s fat bet by bringing in donuts and breakfast tacos into the office (human guile at it’s finest).
In the end, I guess an incentive of money tied to people’s pride works well ?
I had one of those “I love Mylyn“ moments today…
Why yes Mylyn, that’s exactly what I wanted to do with that problem (besides banishing it from my workspace).
It’s the little things that make you smile and see how far we’ve come with the IDE experience. It also makes you want to curse those who don’t think there’s a benefit to IDEs.
But seriously, give Mylyn a try if you aren’t using it already. If you don’t know what Mylyn is, watch this webinar.
I recently joined the advisory board for The Open Source Business Resource (OSBR) which is one of my favorite reads when it comes to crossroads of open source and business. I find that when it comes to quality business-related open source material out there, we don’t have many options (or I’m just not aware of them yet). I mean, besides opensource.com, a couple analyst firms and a few interesting blogs, I don’t have much to go on.
In the latest issue of OSBR which targets the mobile industry, there’s one article I really appreciate by Andreas Constantinou which starts off with this revealing quote…
“Open source licenses tell only half the story. The governance model, the implicit rules defining transparency and influence into an open source project, is the small print that determines the power dynamics around that project.”
If you haven’t noticed, the mobile industry is in an open renaissance when it comes to giving people access to source and allowing them to contribute via a variety of levels. For those who had the pleasure to work in mobile in the past, this is a bit shocking given how the industry previously treated access to mobile operating system source. The important part of the article is when it starts mapping open source license types to governance models (see the fairly accurate figure below). And discusses how the mobile industry needs less marketing hype around the benefits of openness, but more education and clarity on governance models.
See where Eclipse fits in (it’s snuggling next to Symbian)? Do people like it there ?
Just because Android says they are open, doesn’t necessarily mean they are when it comes to governance. Anyways, give the latest OSBR issue a read if the mobile industry is your cup of tea. If you want to see anything in upcoming issues, like a potential theme covered, please let me know.
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