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...
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...
posted by Donald Smith @ 1:38 PM
1 Comments:
At 9:37 AM,
Donald Smith said…
Hi Jan,
My change had abolustely nothing to do with TopLink or Oracle. TopLink continues to do extremely well and the team is still being managed and developed by the same core group that has been doing it since the early Smalltalk days. The EJB3 work the team has been doing has been very invigorating too, I might add. I have nothing but good things to say for the Application Server team at Oracle not only technically but in terms of what a great employer Oracle is. I would definitely strongly recommend TopLink if you want the most breadth and depth of features in ORM.
Over the past few years I had moved into more of a management role and although I love(d) doing the technical conferences and focusing on TopLink, the fact is that back in the Office I was doing more strategic management and business-related projects.
I came to Eclipse because I wanted to get back into a research role and have a stonger business focus in my career. Oracle afforded many options for me in this respect, but there are some unique projects here at Eclipse that really interested me.
- Don
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