Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

Besides finding out that the Eclipse Foundation is finally on Twitter (follow @EclipseFdn), I was greeted with this email this morning regarding the Eclipse Juno release:

It’s available one day early for Friends of Eclipse members who donate to give back a bit to the Eclipse community. If you want to access Eclipse Juno a bit early, consider donating as the money goes to great causes like sponsoring community events and sending students to Eclipse conferences.

Stepping back a moment to reflect on the Eclipse Juno release, it’s amazing to see over 70 projects ship at the same time which results in about 55 million lines of code being delivered.

It’s one of the largest open source releases ever. In my opinion, this is really attributed to the maturity  and professionalism of the Eclipse community. It’s a great feeling to be a small part of this community and of a release this size.

Enjoy!

As Mike Milinkovich recently mentioned, voting is now open for the Eclipse Foundation’s Board of Directors election until 3:00pm Eastern on March 16, 2012. I highly recommend you take a list of the candidates, read their position statements and cast your vote.

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.

Just to let everyone know, some members of the eclipse.org community recently voted on naming the next simultaneous release after Juno gets released in June 2012. Taking input from the community, the Eclipse Planning Council finalized the name to be Kepler.

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

It’s that time of year, please help choose a name for the next eclipse.org simultaneous release!

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 Eclipse Planning Council is going to try to name the Juno+1 release a bit earlier than usual.

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.

Last week, I read an article entitled, “The personal computer is dead” by Jonathan Zitttrain.

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?