Eclipse Ecosystem: February 2006

Eclipse demand up over 25% so far in 2006

As you may recall from an old post, I believe that Dice.com is a pretty darned good indicator of real world demand for technology skills. Back in early January I noted that "Eclipse" had 490 job offers, JDeveloper 95, NetBeans + "Net Beans" 41, IntelliJ 27.

Well, just a few weeks later and Eclipse is at 622 jobs, JDeveloper is up strong also to 129 jobs. IntelliJ is up a bit to 32 and Netbeans + "Net Beans" is down to 31.

Ajax is really taking off, it's gone from 272 in early Jan to 432 today. Ruby went from 66 to 104.

After my last blog I received a lot of pings asking for help on hiring Eclipse talent. My recommendations are to post to the eclipse.employment newsgroup, or to try online at a place like Dice, Monster, HotJobs. When I did hiring at Oracle I had pretty good luck from each.

- Don

Open Source Pavilion at EclipseCon is All Set!

As I previously noted, thanks to a generous sponsorship from Business Objects and the Eclipse Foundation, there will be an Open Source Pavilion at EclipseCon this year. Ten pods have been set aside to celebrate projects that exeplify the F/OSS community that represents the spirit of EclipseCon. It's a great example of an ecosystem in action.

The ten projects chosen by panel were RadRails, JLibrary, JFire, KDE, GNOME, uDig, Spring, Mozilla, Apache Jakarta Commons and Midgard.

Thanks to everyone for their nominations and I'm looking forward to meeting everyone at EclipseCon!

- Don

OSBC West 2006

Just one week after filling in for Ian at Evans DRC2 conference (which had the critics raving), I find myself back at the Argent in San Francisco at OSBC. I have to admit, I think this is the first time I've ever paid to attend a conference. As a veteran of the technical conference circuit, I guess I have to cut my teeth on the business side before jumping in. It means I actually have to pay attention during the sessions instead of bunkering down in the room to do email!

So far I'm a bit "meh" over the whole thing. From a networking perspective, it's been great. I'll spare the roll call, but it's been great to get some names to faces of people I've been emailing and chatting with since joining the foundation. The "meh" comes in with the sessions. It feels like there's a bit too much marketing for my personal comfort level. Perhaps it's simply because I'm used to the hard core techie conferences like Colorado Software Summit, and The Server Side Symposium.

I also mean marketing in another way - there's a lot of talk about how to "market" communities. How to build communities through marketing, and how to leverage marketing benefits from communities. I'm hoping that more emphasis will be put on the "business model" side of things as the conference evolves (it rotates around the globe with a conference in Europe in the summer and out East in the fall). I know many of the speakers here know a heck of a lot about making profitable business models, I rather hear about that than community musings (although the discussion about how Oracle would/could maintain the SleepyCat Community was neat).

I think the reason I bring this up is that I'm concerned that "Open Source" really is just a buzz word for traditional marketing, just as many of the hard-core developer skeptics would lead me to believe. I think it will be much cooler when we've moved past marketing and are talking about business models, business development and more importantly - how successful businesses can be built on COOL F/OSS ecosystems and platforms like Eclipse.

- Don

The Accidental Pitchman - Subway's "Jared" came from the community

"Jared the Subway Guy" has become synonymous with healthy eating, weight loss and, of course, linking Subway to those two things. A great article in Rake Mag (and also picked up in many newspapers over the past few weeks) shows that Jared as a "brand" is likely worth over $600 MILLION per year. YIKES.

At first glance you might assume that this powerful brand and icon came from an exerted traditional marketing effort from Subway. Not true! Friend's of Jared got him a mention in a Men's Health Magazine. Chicago franchisees saw the mention and decided to do a little bit of local marketing. The national marketing team was focusing on hiring famous fitness experts for a promotional push and were completely overtaken by the community that built up around Jared. Once Ophra, Today and Good Morning America came on the scene, the momentum was unstoppable.

It just goes to show the value of community and being part of the conversation. Maybe I'm just being skeptical, but I think if the "Jared" brand was found and promoted in a traditional manner, it would have had a quick boom and bust. I think a huge part of the success was how it grew organically, how it was the community that decided it was cool, and how Subway has mostly let Jared do his own thing.

- Don

Conversational community = Better Products!

Matt Assay has an entry on the Open Source blog at InfoWorld titled "Cranky customers = better products ?"

I think the term "Conversational Community" might be more appropriate than "cranky customers", but the point is still well taken. The more conversational (see "Cluetrain Manifesto") a community is the better the products! Maybe some crankyness can be thrown in for entertainment and motivation though :)

I only come up with this correlation because I was scamming a look at Ian's upcoming talk at Evans Data "DRC2" conference next week. In the talk, Ian is going to really hit on the point that "conversation" builds "community" and community builds success.

BTW - "Community" is not just one person or group talking amongst themselves ;). It implies many groups, including competitors, communicating openly in many different roles.

- Don

LAMP + Eclipse Runoff vote...

I've been accused of splitting the vote! (WARNING: Canadian political reference coming up, skip to the next paragraph if you don't follow us wacky Canadians!) Much like the NDP did to the Liberals in the 80's, and the Reform Party did to the PC's in the 90's, I proposed "LAMPe" and "LAMPE" as two possible choices for the "LAMP+Eclipse" question. Apparently it has split the vote and allowed my fav "AMPLE" to run up the middle.

Therefore, the vote has been reset for a runoff and there are now only 2 choices - AMPLE and LAMPE.

Final results of the first poll were (46 votes cast):