Announcing the Fabulous EclipseCon 2010

I'm pleased to announce that Oisin Hurley will be the EclipseCon 2010 program chair and that he's already come up with great ideas to continue the unbroken streak of fantastic EclipseCons. I'm also pleased to announce that the reason I'm announcing this is that I've agreed to continue organizing EclipseCon: I love creating a place for community and, if I may boast a bit, I'm really good at it.

But enough about me: let's talk about Oisin. He plans to organize the talks around three major themes:

• Making With Eclipse - including technical commercial content, working groups, and vertically aligned projects
• Making At Eclipse - technical content that's highly relevant to Eclipse projects, e.g. state of the nation talks, new tools and techniques, testing, API baselines, etc.
• Making Community - including some introspective stuff and asking ourselves hard questions. Future Eclipse would fit in here, how are we stewarding the longevity of Eclipse as a platform, as a community, as a Foundation.
  

Oisin is putting together the program committee right now and mulling over some good keynotes, but it's the summer slow season right now, so the only action you need to take today is to set aside March 22-25, 2010 for yet another great Eclipse community event.

Criticism is Not Evil

In light of the response Doug has been receiving [1,2,3] and that I received [1,2,3] for saying something other than "it's all roses" about Eclipse, well, may I suggest slide 22 of "Programmer Insecurity and the Genius Myth" by Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick.

Making Money In a Free World

Quoting Chris Anderson (from his book "Free", as quoted in TechFlash):

That's how he says one competes against free software.
I'm sure the successful Eclipse member companies already know this.

Enable Your Project to Accept Meaningful Outside Contributions

Here's what I had hoped to see at Eclipse:

This suggests a start: enable your open-source project to accept meaningful outside contributions that make the project reflective of a wider development community.

But the real goldmine is broadening the definition of "developer" to include lay users of your software. The day that I, as a nontechnical software user, can meaningfully participate in an open-source project is the day that open source will truly have won.

The Foundation has a little of that with the Babel Project, but where is the rest? How about a QA project that use crowd-sourcing to report back which plug-ins work with each other? How about a way to share useful "stacks" of plug-ins? How about that grease monkey for Eclipse idea? How about a crowd-sourced version of the IP process? ...