Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, is giving a talk on building communities around Open Source. For Mike, the key elements of creating an open source platform are:
- Great Technology
- Broad Adoption
- Architecture of Participation
-
Hijacked by a Fanatical Community
His talk is excellent. Eclipse is a cool blend of traditional hacker-driven open source, and corporate smarts due to the genes they inherited from inside IBM. For instance, they have fixed release dates, and synchronize all elements of the release in order to get rid of the dependencies.
Great stuff. A heady blend of open source fandom, with street smart evangelism.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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Good stuff. R U an advocate for open source? what do you think eclipse can do to improve?
Hey Ellen,
I am neither explicitly for, nor against, open source. I think this piece I wrote a while ago would still accurately describe my point of view: http://saunderslog.com/technology/to-open-source-…
When there are good open source projects like Eclipse, Asterisk, Apache, Linux, etc out there, I don't see anything wrong with using them so long as the licensing terms allow you accomplish your business goals. Many of the criticisms which have been levelled at Open Source are not factually grounded, in my opinion, but the licensing criticism can be.
I hesitate to tell you what to do at Eclipse because it's a project I am not very close to. I certainly found Mike's talk compelling though.