So yesterday I strolled over to a happy hour being hosted by Mozilla because I’m all about having free beer, especially since free beer related to open source projects taste better. On my way over, I noticed Mozilla Firefox has a sweet car…

Upon closer examination, I was officially envious of Mozilla’s marketing prowess and budget.

I mean, the BMW M57 engine and desert racing drivetrain setup, what else more could you want?

The web guys have all the fun.

Through the work of the Eclipse Architecture Council (in particular, Dave Carver) we now have a set of basic documentation guidelines at Eclipse that projects can reference. There’s actually some good stuff in there with pointers to other open source projects on how they handle documentation (e.g., Ubuntu). However, there was one missing piece from those guidelines that always bothered me. For most Eclipse.org projects, the barriers are too high to contribute to the documentation because you generally need access to the source control system and commit access (on top of learning what format the documentation is).

For awhile, a few of us had the thought of leveraging the Eclipsepedia wiki as a source and generate documentation from that. If you use the wiki, all people need is a Bugzilla account and learn simple wiki markup in order to contribute documentation; people don’t need to be committers to contribute documentation! The Mylyn project pioneered this approach with their user guide and FAQ through the usage of WikiText. The only problem with the WikiText approach at the time was that there wasn’t an easy consumable example for people to use and learn from. Thankfully, this won’t be a problem anymore.

At EclipseCon 2010, David Green and I will be giving a talk on Documentation: Single-Sourcing, Crowd-Sourcing And Other Voodoo. As part of preparing for the talk, we created a nice example people can use when exploring WikiText. The example takes the wiki page of the example itself and generates some Eclipse help content from it. You can grab the actual code for the example from GitHub.

We hope the example serves people well and that more Eclipse.org projects start looking to source their documentation from the wiki. If you have any questions, feel free to let us know.

Otherwise, please join us for our talk at EclipseCon if you can.

On top of that, EclipseCon is less than 10 days away and I’m not done my presentations and tutorials yet.

The only reassuring thought is that I think I’m not the only one that is procrastinating a bit, right ?

On top of that, we’re nestled next to Chuck Norris! It’s good to be next to Chuck.

Ok, maybe it’s not the “Eclipse” I want it to be… but let’s consider it practice for when EclipseCon rolls around.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.