Skip to main content

2015 Candidate:
Max Rydahl Andersen

Consulting Engineer at Red Hat

Nominee for Contributing Member representative

M2E-WTP committer, retired Dali committer

email:  manderse at redhat.com

Vision

Eclipse has been around for 10+ years. It gained its fame by providing an IDE that was not only just open source but heaps and bounds better than at the time competition.

Over the years the Eclipse IDE gained massive momentum and from that the Eclipse Community has grown stronger and larger and into other areas than just the IDE.

This Eclipse Community which goes beyond the IDE is doing very well and I think Eclipse is gaining a very strong presence and has a bright future to be a home for building open source ecosystems.

But the Eclipse IDE work is stagnating.

Today, many commercial and open source vendors base their own IDE on the tooling ecosystem provided by the efforts done at Eclipse - but they tend to more and more build on top of the IDE; they do not contribute directly to maintain and keep the Eclipse IDE competitive or even simply just alive. Some are not aware that they can or should contribute, some try but get met with a deafening silence or overwhelming amout of work to make their contribution happen.

If this trend continues the Eclipse IDE will not survive.

There are new and ongoing work at Eclipse to make a new IDE - an IDE that is built on webbased technology (Eclipse Cloud Development project), but it will take years with the current speed before it will reach the level of maturity Eclipse had 10 years ago.

That said the IT industry is moving towards heterogeneous development environments. My belief is that both the traditional desktop based IDE and the upcoming web/html5/cloud based IDE's will play a part for many years going forward. Hopefully in a way that makes these play well together.

Unfortunately getting contributions and work on these IDE's are a challenge.

I believe there are many past and future contributions that are being held back because resources have moved away from Eclipse IDE projects to other projects.

We need to bridge these gaps of resources.

Based on those observations, my focus on the board will continue to be:

a) working on finding a way to get the companies and individuals that already have invested in Eclipse IDE to understand the importance of contributing to the Eclipse IDE platform.

b) Remove the technical and organizational barriers in projects that prevent contributions from making it into Eclipse.

c) encourage and support projects that help build bridges between the Eclipse IDE, Orion, Che and other IDE's

d) work on identifying projects or pieces of projects that could be dropped or changed to reduce complexity and make other contributions possible.

In short - continue to keep the tooling platforms that have been built and will be built at Eclipse.org alive and viable for years to come.

About the Candidate

Max Rydahl Andersen is leading the development of JBoss Tools and Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio and have several years working with Eclipse from both outside and inside of eclipse.org. His main interests for Eclipse.org is to keep the Eclipse IDE a viable platform for building desktop based tooling while also getting involved in offering a complementary cloud and web-based tooling offering.

Affiliation

Red Hat

Back to the top