I'm not sure why, but Mozilla has been floating around my world a lot in the last few days. First was Ian's conjecture that Eclipse should sometimes be more like Mozilla. That led me to take a look at what the fuss was about where it finally hit me what Mozilla.com was. It's actually a real company that funds development of Firefox with revenue generated by Firefox's search engine integrations. Apparently they get a ton of money, well $50M+ annually, to spend that way.
Now today, I read that Mozilla is going to try out that formula with Thunderbird. Firefox was probably the right thing at the right time. I'm not sure Thurderbird is, although I'm thinking of tossing Yahoo's slow mail, I mean web mail, interface and switching to T-bird for my home mail. Although, I still love Outlook (especially after a couple years of not using Outlook ;) for my work e-mail. But the idea of funding Thunderbird development to improve it's chances in the market is an intriguing idea.
This is something I've been thinking about in the last couple of years that would be good for Eclipse. The Platform versus IDE wars flame up once in a while and the underpinnings of the Eclipse Foundation and the way most Eclipse projects gets staffed really does force the Open Source version of Eclipse to be a platform, and not necessarily the technically best IDE in the market. And, although we don't run up to them much in the C/C++ space, Netbeans is apparently jumping by leaps and bounds and is starting to be recognized as the more user friendly IDE.
So I wonder out loud. Could a not-for-profit Eclipse Corp. fund an independent collection of developers that could focus on making Eclipse both a great IDE and a great Platform while still providing value for the Board members who would most likely need to fund this venture, at least at the beginning? What would the scope of this corporation be? It couldn't fund every Eclipse project since not all Board members get value out of all of the projects. But there may be a logical place to start and grow as more funding became available. Or would this create a poisonous community of have's and have not's. Interesting to wonder about anyway...
I am not clear as to why a corp is needed when the non-profit organization exists?
ReplyDeleteMy feeling with Mozilla Corp was that they needed to do this to smooth out the money they made from short-term campaigns to benefit the community over the long run - does Eclipse need this?
I would like to see the Eclipse foundation (or a proxy) hire Engineers, to either push risky ideas like Bjorn suggested or to do work to support/promote the open-source Ecosystem that can help Eclipse in the long run - for example solid Linux support or support for Subversion etc.
The Foundation, by the its charter, is not allowed to hire Engineers to do work on Eclipse projects. (at least that's my understanding and I've been told that several times by people who would know).
ReplyDeletePushing risky ideas is one thing (and I do that constantly :). But as is the Eclipse culture, code talks. So without people to actually do the code, the risky ideas just flap in the wind.
Doug,
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing explicit in the Bylaws that says the Eclipse Foundation couldn't hire developers, testers or other staff. I am not sure where that came from.
That statement is not an implicit endorsement of doing so :-) I'm just pointing out that we could change things, not that we should.
This issue is incredibly complex.
P.S. A guy with this many strategic ideas really should run for the Board as a committer rep in the next elections! :-D
I've been wondering the same thing for years... the idea would be to have the foundation hire developers to truly represent the community's interests (rather than the priorities of member companies). Of course, with such a large and diverse community, it can be difficult to distill the community interests.
ReplyDeleteEclipse as an collection of companies will only spend more resources on integration and polish of the IDE if they believe its in their interest to do so. We'd need to consider more how funding the work directly from the Eclipse org facilitates or changes that.
ReplyDeleteThey'd need to feel its important yet be unable/unwilling to pony up developers. It would have to be something like Eclipse as a 'brand' is getting a black eye but the effort requires only a fraction of a developer per member company, so Eclipse.com acts as an aggregator of the development effort.