I look forward to attending the Eclipse Foundation board meeting and also giving the Git tutorial with colleagues. Over half the projects on eclipse.org have already moved to Git, if you haven’t yet or have hesitations, I highly recommend you attend the tutorial. Also, If you just want to grab a frosty beverage and chat open source let me know. I would love to talk to eclipse.org committers who have some ideas on how to make committer life better at the Eclipse Foundation.

See you there!

I’m running this year for one of the committer representative spots and plan to continue to do my best to represent committers if given the opportunity again. I’ve had the honor to be on the board for the last few years and have helped push through changes that I thought were important for the committer community. For example, I would like to see our migration to Git through, we are getting close and I would like to see this happen by the end of 2012…

In terms of the future, there are three main things that are important to me:

There are many businesses that adopt Eclipse tools and runtimes, it’s important that we find a way to support these existing adopters while moving the eclipse.org mission forward. There are companies with mature products built on Eclipse with long support cycles that need to be accommodated. For example, Airbus has a crazy ~30 year support cycle on the planes that they build using Eclipse software. One way to do this is supporting the Long Term Support industry working group and ensuring we have the infrastructure (e.g., common build) in place to support these scenarios.

It’s great that the eclipse.org community prides itself on clean Intellectual Property, I’m proud of what we do and it’s crucial for certain types of commercial adopters. However, the downside to the Eclipse IP process is that it can be a barrier to contribution due to the process and record keeping. Given that the software world has changed in recent years with the advent of Git (distributed version control), GitHub and notion of social coding, we should take a serious look at improving our IP process to work in this new world. Can we find a ways to simplify the contribution process using Git or Gerrit? Can we find a way to host an eclipse.org project outside the eclipse.org infrastructure, say on GitHub? I know, heresy, right ?

Finally, I would like to continue pushing on eclipse.org’s foray into web tooling via projects like Orion. It’s great to see Mozilla Firefox already adopting Orion in its developer tools, but we can do more in this space.

In the end, I encourage everyone to vote and make your voice heard.

The precise release version is 1.3.0.201202151440-r

It can be downloaded from the Eclipse Marketplace or the p2 repository.

There’s a lot of new improvements, the largest being git-submodule support:

I’m also a huge fan of the branch status decorations:

If you’re interested in the details of what’s new, check out the JGit New and Noteworthy and the EGit New and Noteworthy.

Note that this is the last release in the 1.X stream for EGit and JGit, there will be a 2.0 release in June targeting the Eclipse Juno simultaneous release. When we move to 2.0, there will be some breaking API changes and API cleanup that happens. If there was something you didn’t like about the API, now is your chance to speak up and contribute.

If you’re interested in using Gerrit for your eclipse.org project, please speak up on this bug.

It’s satisifying to see this finally be rolled out as a few of us committers have been pushing on this for the past couple of years as a way to modernize the Eclipse infrastructure. We have been piloting Gerrit for quite awhile in the EGit and JGit projects and have been very pleased with it. It’s great that Eclipse committers now have a convenient way of doing code reviews using Git if they wish to add that workflow for their project.

On a side note, I’m working on improving the way git contributions are handled by the Eclipse Foundation when contributors use Gerrit. I’m hoping to simplify the amount of work that needs to be done by committers and the IP team, if you’re interested in this effort, please follow and comment on this bug.

Personally, I think it’s a great choice and a nod to Johannes Kepler.

There are some interesting options this year, it’s even hard for me to vote:

• Kari: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kari_(moon)
• Kratos: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_(mythology)
• Kepler: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Kepler
• Ketu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketu_(mythology)
• Koronis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koronis_family
• Kuiper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt

So, please go vote by January 15th, let’s get a name in time for EclipseCon 2012.

The precise release version is 1.2.0.201112221803-r

It can be downloaded from the Eclipse Marketplace or the p2 repository.

There’s a lot of new improvements, including better performance and stability. If you’re interested in the details of what’s new, check out the JGit New and Noteworthy and the EGit New and Noteworthy.

We hope you find the release useful and please enjoy the holidays!

If you have suggestions, please make them on this bug. Of course, preference will be given to names that start with “K” (e.g., Kepler). Furthermore, preference will be given to names that fit the traditional Eclipse themes (moons, heavenly bodies, gods, scientists).

Enjoy coming up with names! The voting should start in early January.

The basic premise of the article is that there’s an unprecedented shift of power from end users and software developers to operating system vendors on the other. If you’re a software developer, this shouldn’t be a surprise since if you have been developing mobile applications, you should have noticed the walled gardens popping up around you. To distribute applications, you have to go through a vendor like Apple and use their App Store… each individual application has to be vetted and meet a set of standards that isn’t fully transparent. Your application gets a distribution channel and Apple gets to take a cut of your profits. This model was extremely successful for Apple and has now “boomeranged back to the PC.”

There’s now an App Store for the Mac to match that of the iPhone and it carries the same restrictions essentially. I’m almost 100% sure that Microsoft will replicate this model in their next operating system. As the article states, “today’s developers are writing code with the notion not just of consumer acceptance, but also vendor acceptance.”

I theorize that these typed of wall gardens will slowly start taking advantage of what is going on in the development tooling space. With the advent and eventual maturity of online development tools (see Ace or Eclipse Orion), I envision companies forcing you to write software with tools hosted on their server and then finding a way to “tax” you for the usage. Imagine Google Chrome becoming the worlds most popular browser. Google starts integrating “apps” more prominently in their browser and the way the apps are written are fully online using their web-based tool-chain. To get an app in the browser, you have to go through some control point Google sets up.

Imagine writing software for say the blackfin processor, fully hosted on their infrastructure since that’s the way Analog Devices likes it. The company gets a new control point and potentially another revenue stream. In the end, the tools may even be more convenient for developers but what path are we heading down…?

I’m not sure if the trend is good or bad yet, but there’s definitely a shift of power from end users and software developers to vendors. I feel there’s a definitive trend in the software industry to build walled gardens. Will we start losing the power to tinker and use our own tools to do development? Will I start having nightmares that involve RMS screaming at me (while wearing some crazy costume) about free software and saying he was correct all along?

To end my diatribe, here’s a final quote from the article to mull over, “… if we allow ourselves to be lulled into satisfaction with walled gardens, we’ll miss out on innovations to which the gardeners object, and we’ll set ourselves up for censorship of code and content that was previously impossible. We need some angry nerds.”

Maybe I should have had more coffee this morning, thoughts?

I’m very proud of the progress the two projects have made since we fought to have the projects move to eclipse.org and build a community there. It’s amazing to see JGit being used on Android via Agit and even have some crazy folks automagically port JGit to C# (NGit) to enable Git usage on the .NET platform. Shawn even talked about how JGit is being used within the walls of Google to power the android.googlesource.com git repositories by stuffing git objects into BigTable. Heck, there are some instances that JGit is even faster than native cgit.

In the end, it was nice to catch up with some old friends and even make some new ones this time around. A special thank you to the Google Open Source Program Office for hosting the event and providing some delicious birthday cake to commemorate ten years of the eclipse project.