My New Challenge: Helping Develop the Eclipse Ecosystem

2005 is going to go down in my own history as one of the busiest years of my life. Between the wedding, conferences, completing the MBA and designing the new house, it's been great to finally have a week over Christmas to relax.

2006 is going to be quite busy as well, since I will be immersing myself into a new position at the Eclipse Foundation as "Director of Ecosystem Development". I'm quite proud to be part of the foundation and am eager to start working on some of the projects (stay tuned here for more info...)

My focus is going to be on the business (ecosystem) development side, although my role will certainly require a technical aptitude. One of my "pet" projects is going to be to build agreement on business terminology in the open source community. Concepts like "free" and "open" are way too subjective to be bandied around like they are - it's time we had an agreed ontology.

Moreover, I hope to research, promote and develop with both Eclipse members and academia some of the business models that are sustaining the open source community. At first glance it would appear that businesses based open source products exist primarily on revenue from support, documentation and services. There is a heck of a lot more to it than that (think about branding, advertising and cross-selling to just name a few).

Stay tuned in the new year...