Well I have some good news. I’ll be in scenic Toronto for the Eclipse Helios DemoCamp on June 29th, 2010. I’ll probably speak about Git and Eclipse unless people have other requests.
The event is graciously hosted by Red Hat and organized by Andrew Overholt.
If you’re interested in speaking or attending, please let us know. Sign up on the wiki! After the event, we’ll go for frosty beverages because speaking about open source makes me thirsty! 🙂
Ian Skerrett recently posted the trends from the Eclipse Community Survey 2010.
What interests me?
“Linux continues to gain market share on the developer desktop”
“In 2007, 20% said Linux was their development operating system. Now, in 2010 almost a third (33%) say Linux. The biggest loser seems to be Windows 73.8% in 2007 down to 58.3% in 2010. Interestingly, Mac OS X has only gone from 3.5% to 7.9%.”
I expect this trend to continue with Windows losing a bit more share next year. On top of that, I would be really interested to see the segmented results of what open source developers use as their primary development operating system versus normal developers. I mean, I can’t be the only one who hasn’t noticed that any conference you go to that features a lot of open source developers… you tend to see a lot of shiny Macs. It’s almost scandalous given how closed Apple is with everything.
The other nice trend I like is regarding version control systems.
“Git usage up from 2.4% (2009) to 6.8% (2010). Mercurial usage also increased from 1.1% to 3%. This growth seems to be coming from the decreased use of CVS, 20% (2009) to 12.6% (2010). Subversion continues to be the most popular at 58.3%.”
I expect to see DVCS continue to rise next year when the tooling becomes better and people become more knowledgeable about their VCS options (if you been living in a centralized VCS world for a long time, making the jump to a DVCS takes some time). I think the trend of large open source communities (e.g., Eclipse) using or moving to a DVCS will help the trend toward DVCS dominance. This aligns nicely with one of my goals is to make sure Eclipse.org is running fully on Git soon.
I highly recommend taking a full read through the survey.
Last night we had an Eclipse Helios DemoCamp close to my home in sunny Austin, TX. It was nice to see some old faces and some new faces from Austin’s gaming community. Thomas Watson from IBM and the Equinox team discussed some Equinox/OSGi related things and in particular how the infamous bug 4922 got fixed (it’s not as easy of a problem as you think).
Who would have known the intricacies of getting the solution to work on a variety of platforms.
Ken Ryall from Nokia and the CDT team discussed what’s new in CDT 7.0 for Helios!
The CDT project is still going strong. We had an audience member from a gaming called BioWare (now owned by Electronic Arts) applaud the work that has gone in the CDT indexer. They use the CDT internally for some large projects (3+ million LOC) and are pretty pleased with the progress minus a few workflow issues. I was just thrilled to learn that folks within the gaming industry are using nice open source tools like Eclipse. Did I try to rope in the fellow to contribute to CDT? Of course but as we know there’s stages when it comes to engaging with an open source community, not everyone is at the same stage of the game.
Shawn Spiars talked about some of the advances in the SWT Browser Widget over the years.
I learn something new everyday… I didn’t realize all the neat Java-to-JavaScript and JavaScript-Java functionality in the SWT Browser widget API now.
Since my focus at Red Hat as of late has been Git, I ended up talking about how Git tooling is progressing at Eclipse and gave a demo of the latest EGit release.
People were very enthusiastic about having solid Git support at Eclipse.
In the end, I just want to say thanks for everyone who made it out and hope you enjoyed the beer. I look forward to the meetup of the Austin Eclipse community!
The EGit and JGit teams are happy to announce that 0.8.1 (release review slides) has been released and submitted as part of the Eclipse Helios simultaneous release. For now, you can download it from our software repository: http://download.eclipse.org/egit/updates-0.8
Just as Helios rides the chariot of the sun to give light and heat to the world, we hope that this release provides a little light to the folks that are yearning for better Git support within Eclipse and Java.
What’s new and noteworthy?
So what’s next after this release? Well, we plan to release 0.9.0 in September 2010 and here are the things on the tentative plan so far…
Are you interested in contributing to the EGit and JGit projects?
In the end, we hope you enjoy the release and support our quest to get a 1.0 release out the door by the end of 2010.
Here’s a reminder that there’s an Eclipse Helios DemoCamp tomorrow in beautiful Austin, TX.
There will be talks about Git, OSGi/Equinox, CDT and other Eclipse-related topics. There will be a variety of Eclipse committers and enthusiasts in attendance so if you ever wanted to track someone down to talk about Git, OSGi/Equinox or CDT this would be a good time. Also and more importantly, there will be beer from Uncle Billy’s that will help fuel the Eclipse discussion.
The speakers get to keep the growler as a benefit!
So don’t be shy, it’s not to late to sign up if you want to swing by or speak.
See you tomorrow evening at Texas Coworking!
Over memorial day weekend, I noticed that the Apache Software Foundation is having a little fun with marketing over Twitter.
I’m a fan of their “Did you know…” series of posts as of late. I mean, I had no idea Apache Shindig is the foundation for the LinkedIn InApps platform… and I’m sure the folks at LinkedIn wouldn’t have told me in a straightforward fashion either. I mean no offense to the folks at LinkedIn and other companies that use open source software, but they generally don’t do the best job advertising the open source technology they use. Sure, some companies are better than others but my point is that the burden of marketing seems to fall on the open source projects themselves. The problem with that is that open source developers are generally terrible at marketing (well, mostly apathetic). And I can guarantee you that if no one talks about your project or can find it, no one will be really using it even though it may be a great piece of work.
At Eclipse.org, I know this has been a bit of problem given just the diversity of projects and from people who have spoken to me. The Eclipse Foundation has done a good job when it comes to case studies on people building upon the Eclipse platform, but what else can it do for projects? From my own experience in supporting people who use Eclipse technology in the field… it’s quite amazing where you see Eclipse technology turn up… from ski lifts to banks to rail way systems. I don’t think many people understand the breadth of places that Eclipse technology shows up. Just a couple days ago I learned that Xtext was helping the automotive folks at AUTOSAR.
If the burden of marketing falls to open source projects themselves, what can you do to convince people to “sell” their project a bit? Should we suggest webinars as something people do as part of the release review process at Eclipse? Should a book be required as part of a graduation review at Eclipse (ok, maybe that’s a bit much but I’m still waiting on my Xtext book)?
Just some food for thought.
The Eclipse community and the Eclipse Planning Council have spoken.
The name of the next simultaneous Eclipse release after Helios will be called Indigo.
I like it. Guess when it will be released? The end of June like the rest of the simultaneous releases.
At Eclipse.org, we have a governance structure.
One of those pieces, the Eclipse Development Process (EDP) was recently updated. The committer representatives worked hard with the Eclipse Foundation to ensure the changes would be beneficial to committers and the Eclipse community. At the last Eclipse Foundation Board meeting, the Board of Directors finally approved changes to the EDP that will be effective August 1st, 2010.
If you’re curious about the exact changes, I recommend looking at the diff.
So I have good news for those who are interested in improved Git tooling at Eclipse. The EGit and JGit projects are coordinating over the next couple weeks to release 0.8.0 which will be part of the Eclipse Helios release. So what’s changed? Here’s a brief list of new and noteworthy items for 0.8.0
Well, we have managed to attract some new contributors to the project which is great. Sure, there are still some things missing in 0.8.0 (e.g., rebasing support) but we are definitely making progress. The next release after 0.8.0 will be o.9.0 and that will happen in about 3-4 months from now. We plan to iterate quick based on feedback from our community of users. A lot of the EGit team members have also been doing a good job of dogfooding more and more.
If you want to help us test 0.8.0 release candidates, please grab EGit from the nightly repository and help us dogfood 🙂
Every wanted to make this unsigned prompt dialog go away when you’re installing things into Eclipse?
Well, the best way to get rid of this dialog is to actually sign your JARs like most mature Eclipse.org projects do. At first I didn’t think it was possible to remove this dialog without signing your JARs, however, after working with a colleague I discovered the eclipse.p2.unsignedPolicy system property (you learn something new everyday, right?). For example, if you didn’t want this dialog to appear, you can set -Declipse.p2.unsignedPolicy=allow when your Eclipse-based application starts up. The valid values for eclipse.p2.unsignedPolicy are:
If you’re interested in the original bug report, check it out here.
