Too few cooks

On Planet Eclipse we've had some harsh but healthy discussion on how Eclipse could be better organized for success. There are probably little things that need to be done, but at the end, I think the conclusion is that the Foundation staff are doing a pretty good job and Eclipse is organized to accomplish what it was intended to, to provide an open ecosystem for companies to work together on Eclipse platform technologies.

But I am still very worried about Eclipse. And the main problem I am seeing is that there are too few people making the wheels turn, especially as we push Galileo out the door. I figure if we removed probably 3 or 4 people from the equation, Galileo would stop dead in it's tracks and the release wouldn't happen. That is scary in my books. Even on the CDT, if I didn't do the countdown to releases, as I've done for the past 5 years or so, the CDT wouldn't release either. Or at the very least, someone else would have to jump in. And I won't even start with the e4 flexible resource project which currently has one part time guy actually doing code.

That's a pretty big burden for those few. And give the number of commercial vendors that rely on Eclipse technologies, I wonder if it's fair. The good news is that these few people have a lot of passion and are very focused on making Eclipse releases happen. So it will be a success. But understaffed projects is a chronic problem at Eclipse and that's where I fear it's future.

Maybe this fear comes from my own situation where I've been reduced to pretty much working on CDT in my hobby time plus a few hours here and there in my day job. But I know a lot of people in the same position and really wonder how we'll accomplish our goals in the upcoming year for Eclipse. That's the reality we need to figure out how to deal with and improve. Eclipse governance problems is incredibly minor compared to that.