2015 Candidate:
John Arthorne

It is a time of exciting changes for the Eclipse Foundation. The foundation started out over ten years ago as a venue for software tool vendors to collaborate. It turns out this "place" that was created for a very specific collaboration - its policies, governance, development practices, staff and community - translates very well to many different domains. Today there are whole industry sectors, from automotive, to geomatics, aerospace, and large scale science labs, that have discovered the value of the Eclipse community as the ideal place to collaborate on software projects. Thanks to this new breadth, the foundation is at an all-time high in both membership and active projects. If I am re-elected to represent committers on the board, I will work on reducing barriers for these new projects and contributors coming on board. I will push on further simplifying and automating development processes to allow committers to focus more of their time on coding.

At the same time, the wider software development community continues to equate the Eclipse Foundation with the original development tool platform and its widely known IDEs for Java, C, and other languages. The platform has suffered from dwindling investment and support over the years, and has suffered in quality, performance, and ease of use. The success and reputation of the Eclipse Foundation remains linked to the success of the Eclipse Platform, and I believe the Foundation needs to renew its focus on helping the Eclipse Platform improve. If re-elected, I will work on the board to help make this happen. This will include continuing to encourage more companies to actively contribute to the Platform, and for the Foundation staff to take a more active role in its development.