Having joint a BoF session with Naci Dai (member of the WTP project mangement committee) tonight, I now have a clearer view on what is special about the Eclipe community. Being initiated by a big company like IBM obviously helped to provide a sustainable and solid foundation for the whole community. There are for example strictly enforced processes - like how to become a committer to an Eclipse project. Only developers who have proven to deliver quality code by regularly contributing to newsgroups or BugZilla are elligible to be suggested as a new contributer. Not even a company that sponsers a project has the right to bypass this process.
Also, there is a long process for new project approvals - it usually takes several month before a project even gets into the incubator. All of this ensures that the community is composed of motivated AND talented people - which results in a pretty good quality of the Eclipse ecospace.
Although there are strict processes to comply with, the internal project organisation is left to the projects and leaves a lot of flexibility. This is important for the agile self-organisation of the teams and clearly works out quite well - as long as the projects are kept small.
The clear message is that Eclipse does not want to be SourceForge - nobody should simply come along and "dump" some code, but the contributors are expected to be sustainable - which might explain the fact that merely about 1% of the committers are students. An astonishingly low figure! So Eclipse is really backed by companies sponsoring the developments by dedicating staff members to the projects.
Every employer of a committer must sign an IP agreement that the code that is contributed is automatically under the Eclipse license. Interestingly, Google is one of the few companies who does not sign these agreements, such that there are no Eclipse committers from Google. It seems that "don't be evil" does not automatically translate into "be good". At least it shows that Google sees the Eclipse community as some kind of competition to their own initiatives. Interestingly, at the Eclipse Summit you can find many flyers from google about the summer of code etc. How did they get there? Seems that Eclipse is not totally unimportant for Google...
Also, there is a long process for new project approvals - it usually takes several month before a project even gets into the incubator. All of this ensures that the community is composed of motivated AND talented people - which results in a pretty good quality of the Eclipse ecospace.
Although there are strict processes to comply with, the internal project organisation is left to the projects and leaves a lot of flexibility. This is important for the agile self-organisation of the teams and clearly works out quite well - as long as the projects are kept small.
The clear message is that Eclipse does not want to be SourceForge - nobody should simply come along and "dump" some code, but the contributors are expected to be sustainable - which might explain the fact that merely about 1% of the committers are students. An astonishingly low figure! So Eclipse is really backed by companies sponsoring the developments by dedicating staff members to the projects.
Every employer of a committer must sign an IP agreement that the code that is contributed is automatically under the Eclipse license. Interestingly, Google is one of the few companies who does not sign these agreements, such that there are no Eclipse committers from Google. It seems that "don't be evil" does not automatically translate into "be good". At least it shows that Google sees the Eclipse community as some kind of competition to their own initiatives. Interestingly, at the Eclipse Summit you can find many flyers from google about the summer of code etc. How did they get there? Seems that Eclipse is not totally unimportant for Google...