| Re: [eclipse-ide-wg] Essence of the WG (was: 1st meeting of Eclipse IDE WG interested parties) |
Those slides are unbalanced and don't mention some of the recent main achievements; for example the IDE download stats which remain encouraging despite many were saying the IDE would die soon, the increasing amount of contributors and improved diversity to the core parts, and the new programming and technology stacks the Eclipse IDE can now reach with way lower investment...
Perhaps. But I think Ed was simply trying to focus on the issues
to be addressed rather that the victories to be celebrated. I
think everyone here agrees that project diversity and contribution
have grown in recent times. But at the same time, I think that
everyone here agrees that there are issues with the sustainability
of the current processes that need to be addressed.
I know that there is debate within the Eclipse Project as a whole
about whether to focus more on increasing contribution or on
platform quality. I see that as orthogonal to the topic of
creating a working group which is the subject of this mailing
list. Please don't repeat that debate here.
It would be nice to see in front of the negative points some concrete proposals of how a working group may help in making things better. I'm pretty sure it's again the resource/revenue/funding topic that will be mentioned, but the big question is more how can such a working group concretely generate more contribution (direct manpower or funding) to the Eclipse IDE stack. What's the growth opportunity the WG will unlock?
At least for the moment there is no intent to have have the
working group "concretely generate more contribution". As you've
pointed out, that's already working well. I think that the goals
of the working group are laid quite well in the Vision and Scope
section of the draft
charter.
tl;dr: it's mostly about fixing the sustainability and resource
issues in the SimRel.
I've recently stumbled up this tweet: https://twitter.com/EclipseFdn/status/1366782105993232386 . The EF used to promote events related to "Eclipse Projects" or "Eclipse technologies" in general. I read it seems now more restricted to working groups. Is this an actual restriction?
No it is not. Never has been and never will be. One tweet does
not make or imply policy. For example, we currently have two full
press releases under construction to celebrate some project
releases. That said, it should be obvious that working groups
which have marketing budgets and which staff full-time marketing
professionals get more marketing done. However, the intent of this
working group is not primarily about marketing. It is about
ensuring the sustainability of SimRel as the platform for the
Eclipse desktop technologies ecosystem.
So I'd really like to know what is the added-value this working group is expected to add to the statu quo for committers, because at the moment, I don't see anything obvious and -at the contrary- I (over-?)interpret some signs that the creation of this working group may actually come with a loss of services for committers in general.
I don't see this as changing very much for the committers on the
individual IDE platform projects. That is not the intent. Nor is
it a requirement for creating a working group. Of course we will
continue to encourage all companies involved in the working group
to contribute developers to the projects. But at least as of this
moment we don't expect that to substantially change the status quo
in the projects.
Eclipse working groups do not change project governance. The
purpose of all working groups are to complement projects by
providing additional services, programs, or value not performed
well by open source projects. Typical examples include marketing,
specification processes, branding, community development
activities, developer advocacy, pooled funding for development,
and the like. As I said above I think that the intentions of this
working group are well explained in the draft
charter.
HTH
Mike Milinkovich
Executive Director | Eclipse Foundation AISBL
mike.milinkovich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
@mmilinkov
+1.613.220.3223 (m)