I’m pleased to announce I have decided to join Red Hat.
Gandhi said you must be the change you wish to see in the world. I was given a unique opportunity to change things and am looking forward to it. Look for me to strengthen the state of Eclipse on Linux and improve the state of Git tooling at Eclipse. On top of that, I get the opportunity to spread the Eclipse and OSGi love to the JBoss folks.
I look forward to seeing everyone at EclipseCon and enjoying some frosty beverages.
When I came home last night, I was delighted to find a package (because I’m a fan of gifts).
What was in the package? A brand spanking new copy of the Equinox OSGi book.
In my biased opinion, this is best OSGi book on the market. I’ve had the honor to see the book evolve while it was written. Through that experience, the OSGi tooling at Eclipse (PDE) improved significantly. The authors were kind enough to nag inform me when things didn’t work the way they desired and I did my best to fix everything.
Why is this the best OSGi book on the market? First off, the authors know their stuff and have been working with OSGi before it was cool. Second, the book comes with one of the best example OSGi applications I’ve seen. Third, kind words are said about me in the Acknowledgments section 🙂
The only downside, my last name was spelled wrong in the Acknowledgments section (will be fixed in second printing).
So what are you waiting for, grab the book and play with the Toast example.
If you want hands on training from the authors of the book and me, please attend our tutorial at EclipseCon! It’s not too late to register!
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.
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.
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 :)?
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.
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…
For those living in academia, what do you think? What would benefit you?
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?
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.
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.
