Next week is EclipseWorld in DC, and I will be there as well. E-mail me if you want to meetup then.

Also, BostonEDGE has been been graciously given 2 free passes to EclipseWorld and we have a discount code to give the rest of the members $200 off the registration. If you are interested in the discount code or the free passes drop me an e-mail, and depending on the demand I will give out the discount codes and raffle off the passes.

• I will be giving a talk at the Boston Java Meetup Group on the latest happenings in Eclipse. If you want to attend, sign-up here: Boston Java Meetup
• After the talk we will be heading to a local bar: Asgard (map). The plan is to show demos, chat, and have some of the drinks and food that we will have there. If you are interested in demoing something or just attending put you name here (it will help us plan): Eclipse DemoCamp 2008 - Ganymede Edition/Boston.

The Boston DemoCamp is being being organized by us (Architexa) and Iona, along with help from the Eclipse Foundation - Thanks!

If you are here in Boston and want to celebrate with us drop a note below.

It’s taken me a few months to get the remainder of things under control. I have been taking care of a huge back-log of todos, and now I feel like I can finally get back to the real world. I have begun to figure out my future plans, but am still sorting out some of the details, and will post it here as soon as I have finalized my plans. The gist though is that I will continue doing the type of things that I have been doing while working on my PhD - in what exact form that will happen is the part being figured out.

The other thing that I am committing to - one of my resolutions for ‘08 - is for blogging more frequently. This is primarily because over the last two years, I have really come to appreciate reading blogs and getting an understanding of opposing biases - instead of just getting a single likely incomplete view from a news site. So I am going to join this conversation. In making this easier for me, here are the standard disclaimers: all postings here are my personal opinions. The opinions do not necessarily represent the opinions of anyone who I work for or work with. And the opinions here can change. In fact many of my posts are with the hope that someone will give me a good reason to consider changing my opinion.

My personal problem with this approach is the future product cost. In this case, it seems that Project Zero is free, but will it always be so? Now, I don’t mind as much as the cost to me, but more about the cost to other users, as this often drives adoption of the technology (which motivates me to consider making their lives easier). As a hacker I like building plugins, but before I invest energy in doing so, I want to know that potential users can use my plugin without problem. In other words, I want to understand the long term vision of the product. I have seen way too many companies that have products free (or cheap) initially as a temporary strategy to get an initial user base, a strategy which can work well for the original company in getting people exposure to the product. But such a strategy is not conducive to third-party providers who need to accordingly plan resources.

So, with respect to Project Zero, I want to know more about how IBM plans to make money with it, and quite frankly there is not enough here.

And I noticed that the Mylyn/Mylar project is the first ever addition to the standard Eclipse download. Congratulations guys! I know that there has been alot of work behind the plugin. (I guess it is time for me to try using it.)

Looking at the page, I had two ‘disappointments’ though:

• Mylyn seems to not be included in the C/C++ package. As a plugin developer, I was hoping that over-time users’ Eclipse environments for Java and C/C++ would get closer. This forces us to choose between building on Mylyn or building on the C/C++ package.
• SVN support is not included in the packages. Yes, I know that the licensing issues need to be resolved. But its absence is a limitation. Having something would make our (plugin-developers) lives easier in providing support for only one platform. (Also, it is hard to be evangelizing Eclipse when every developer that I have been talking to in the last few months is using subversion).

I am also not sure what the difference is between Eclipse Classic and the RCP/Plug-in Developers editions. The current page is only a prototype, so I imagine this will become clarified soon.

And if you are a committer or a committer wannabe there is this group (and this post) as well.

So, about a year after release…

If you use more than one version, please do select the one you use most often. If you are using a product built on Eclipse please indicate the version of the Eclipse base: Rational 6.0 is built on Eclipse 3.0, 7.0 is built on Eclipse 3.2, etc.

If someone has statistics (or rough estimates) for this, that will definitely be appreciated.

I am referring to these challenges as being internal, as they are caused by the open-source community itself, and not because of some external companies marketing machine. Now, living in the open-source world makes it easier for us to recognize and know of these challenges before the users of our tools, so perhaps we can do something about it.

Some of the challenges I have noticed (I’d be curious to hear of more challenges and solutions to these):

• Religion: Perhaps this is more true at MIT than other places. I came here expecting open-source as a great source of driving innovation, but then I met Richard Stallman and his ‘guilty until proven innocent’ approach. Perhaps every community needs to have one or two extremists, but they scare me because of the damage they can do to the community itself. I can only hope here that Religion is not as big an issue among the rest of the community, and by reading Mike’s post I am more hopeful.
• Low Quality: Beyond the open-source foundations, most open-source projects that I have used have had significant quality issues. Perhaps the community needs to work together on a rating system for projects to describe the project quality? Maybe all we need is to break down the ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ terms into something names with more technical meanings, such as ‘used every-day by 50% of users’, ‘rated over 80% by users in terms of usability’ or ‘fixed 95% of all known crashing bugs’.
• Virality: It is surprising how many well-educated and successful think of open-source as always being viral. While I do agree that it is is important to understand virality issues in open-source code, it is hard to convince people that only a portion of the open-source projects have viral code. I have been a fan of the innovation that can happen on open-source platforms and in general recommend companies to help open-source communities in return for appreciation and indirect marketing to the community members, however, this has been hard because of the “won’t we then have to release our code”?
• PR: If almost everyone company supports open-source (and some for possibly devious reasons), then users will end up hearing open-source in many context and will possibly end up being disappointed in many circumstances. I am not sure if there is any real solution here, except for projects to emphasize the ways or particular strengths that open-source brings for them. Perhaps we need to more actively promote the open-source projects which have enough mass that are being built mostly by companies as a secondary function of their core product (such as with the Apache Web Server, and as Doug mentioned the Eclipse CDT.

It is worth noting that these challenges are not faced by the many open-source foundations that exist, i.e., in particular the Apache, Eclipse, and Mozilla foundations. Infact recently when talking to non-coders about software development I have found myself more often comparing approaches to these organizations and providing their key characteristics such as community, collaboration, and alternatives to standardization, as opposed to even mentioning open-source. Perhaps, at some level I feel that the challenges have diluted the Open Source brand when compared to that of these foundations.

On the topic of ‘brand dilutions’ and other business school terms, as a side note, I wanted to thank Howard for taking on Open Source in his characteristic biased, opinionated, yet logical style. If anything, it has raised good long-lasting discussion in the past, and I am glad to see Open-Source challenges being raised so that the community can try tackling them. (…and yes, I do need a favor from him. )

I am happy to see that there is more recognition of the ‘information overload’ problem. Though my worry is in a different direction - that of the increased push for Job Specialization.

I remember being told that it was hard for our parents to imagine TV’s when they where kids, and today computers and interactivity have clearly changed work and entertainment. How are things going to change in the next 20-30 years?

And beyond pure technology, as the planet is made smaller politics will likely bring surprises as well…

So the million dollar question is: how can we be prepared for this change?