Eclipse Strife (bonus: We are the trollz!)

kgilmer's Blog

I was just catching up on some Eclipse Planet reading while waiting for a build, and came across a fun little dialog between Mike Milinkovich and Bjorn Freeman-Benson. Essentially there is some discussion is to how the Eclipse Foundation balances the needs of its for-profit members and its open source communities. This has been a long time souce of confusion for me, as once upon a time I did some small work on ECF. The problem was I always was confused about who the work was really benefiting. I could not come up with a good answer and so my interests moved on. I think to a large degree the Eclispe community is a community of software vendors, not individuals. While this is no surprise, it means the projects and work that happen in Eclipse are things that corporations want, more so than individuals. At least in comparison to some other communities I'm familiar with. While I see no problem, I understand why it might be difficult for the Eclipse community to attract a larger set of individual contributors. I look forward to seeing how the Eclipse community, the project, and users needs evolve over time.

An unexpected bonus to this reading was in uncovering the secret policy as to how Bug Labs may have been removed from the planet:

"In my mind at least, deleting someone from Planet is akin to designating them a troll."

-http://dev.eclipse.org/blogs/mike/2009/11/30/dear-bjorn-go-away/#comment-231

While no smoking gun (for who's mind is it?) this points clearly to a reason why we were rather unceremoniously axed from the planet. Mystery solved!

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I haven't seen the bug yet, but here's the proper bugzilla link :)

I think we are a bit more open to what appears on the Planet. Since your stuff is open source we should have no problem with it. At least I don't and I'm the one who mainly controls PlanetEclipse outside the Eclipse.org webmasters.

Hi Chris! Thanks for your repsonse. As I recall I think the opposite may have been the cause, as there were many posts for various BUG projects which may have not been 100% appropriate for the planet. But, again since there was no warning or transparency as to the cause or decision it's impossible to know. In any case, water under the bridge. I will open a bug.

thanks again,

ken