Bjorn Freeman Benson left his position on Eclipse Foundation.
Steve Northover has left both IBM & Eclipse. If you look closer at his new company "Bedarra Research Lab" you will notice that it is owned by dr. Brian Barry, the dr. Brian Barry who leaded OTI when it created VisualAges and Eclipse(!).
BRL states on their webpage:
We have opted for a private model so that BRL can take an aggressive entrepreneurial approach to research projects, without the time consuming approval cycles, intellectual property constraints and overhead of conventional R&D labs.
If two great people leave (more or less) Eclipse and in both cases we can see some kind of protest against "conservative" rules... it is time to discuss.
Is Eclipse agile enough to survive?
Or is it just my paranoia?
7 comments:
At least Eclipse is not reinforced that's for sure.
People make personal decisions for purely personal reasons. It's best not to read too much into those.
So what's the best way to be agile? What exactly does that mean? Isn't it always the case that intelligent people will tend to disagree in terms of opinions about what's the best approach for optimizing a process? Is it better to be conservative or liberal? Who's to say?
In general, balance is most important of all. Definitely discussion is good, but paranoia is not.
I agree with Ed's comments.
It's worth mentioning that Dave Thomas, former CEO of OTI, is also involved with Bedarra.
This theory is rather a kind of provocation don't take it too seriously.
Due to some rules ("binary compatibility, contract compatibility") Eclipse is not able to evolve. I know that these are required by business, but it also means that no sin will ever be forgiven.
I know that a lot of people works hard on Eclipse, but changes since 3.0 are not revolutionary (maybe except P2, which is real pain ;-) for me).
I do understand both Steve, more, I almost envy him of being able to work with that kind of people.
But if fathers of Eclipse (which is great indeed) left it to start something new, I have a strong feeling that something better than Eclipse will appear soon ;-).
Every time I read a blog and comments like this I find it a huge insult to the 80-100 (or so projects) at Eclipse that aren't about the Java IDE. Maybe you guys are all just living in the past, while some of us are moving to the future?
Donald,
Insulting was not my intention. Actually it is me who should be insulted by "Java-IDE" ;-).
We do live in the past tied by backward compatibility, and because of that you do not have to rewrite your code every summer ;-).
Just to illustrate my words with living example - P2. It is real pain for almost all users. It has great assumptions, but it has to struggle with the past (compatibility) and with users habits (that's a real nightmare). Do you know why P2 was created? Because Update Manager become impossible to maintain. And I am afraid that the whole Platform is going in that direction.
I would like to be able to delete deprecated API after some time (f.e. 3 releases).
Jacek pointed me to this bug. https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=279539. Something is happening :-)
Post a Comment