I was in Raleigh for business yesterday. What’s the first thing I do when I’m in Raleigh?
I hit up Bojangles.
The fried chicken in Austin just isn’t the same. And yes, I have no shame.
SxSw, Mozilla and Budget Envy
By Chris Aniszczyk
For about two weeks every year, my town gets invaded for SxSw… a large music, film, and interactive conference and festival. It’s good times, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Mozilla has a pretty big presence as the festival as they do a great job building community and promoting their open web message.
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.
Crowdsourcing Documentation at Eclipse
By Chris Aniszczyk
As David Green mentioned recently, there’s been some momentum building around documentation best-practices at Eclipse. Documentation has always been one of those pain points in Eclipse (or for most open source projects imho), from lack of consistency to not being able to leverage your community to improve the situation.
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.
EclipseCon, API Freeze, Procrastination and Panic
By Chris Aniszczyk
For those who don’t know, the Eclipse Platform freezes its APIs soon with the release of Eclipse 3.6 M6… a great time to start targeting Eclipse if you’re planning to ship a product on the Eclipse Helios release (or a great time to start bribing platform committers for API changes). At this point, API won’t change and only a couple features will sneak in until 3.6 M7 which feature freeze hits. After that, it’s a sprint to the finish to get the Eclipse Helios release out the door.
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 :)?
Eclipse is Trending!
By Chris Aniszczyk
Oh this is awesome… Eclipse is trending on Twitter.
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.
Eclipse and Academia
By Chris Aniszczyk
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?
Liferay goes LGPL (Weak Copyleft)
By Chris Aniszczyk
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?
Eclipse.org Project Review Templates
By Chris Aniszczyk
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.
Texas Independence Relay 2010
By Chris Aniszczyk
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.
Eclipse Ideas for Google Summer of Code 2010
By Chris Aniszczyk
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.