Eclipse at MySQL Users Conference

I've always been a fan of the gang at MySQL. For many years I've been watching closely at how well they understand Open Source in general, but particularly how keen they are with Open Source business models. If you ever find yourself looking at names like Zack Urlocker, Marten Mickos, or Taneli Otala on a conference program, you should go have a listen.

Luckily, the MySQL Users Conference 2006 is just a few weeks away at the very same facility that EclipseCon was just at -- the Santa Clara Convention Center. If you have the chance, you should check it out!

- Don

Demand for Eclipse Skills continues rapid growth. JDeveloper shows strength too.

Demand for Eclipse skills continues to grow rapidly. Since the beginning of 2006, the demand for Eclipse skills on dice.com, a leading IT career portal, has grown from 490 to 754, up over 50% in just 3 months. JDeveloper continues growing it's demand as well, going from 95 to 123. IntelliJ is up slightly from 27 to 29 whereas NetBeans continues its fall going from 41 to 30.

Visual Studio demand appears flat, going from 1398 at the beginning of this month down to 1375 today.

What is interesting about career postings for Eclipse is the growth in demand is primarily for platform related skills as opposed to postings that just rattle off IDE's. For example, this Covansys job looking for Eclipse plug-in developers or this Nexaweb posting.

In fact, refining searches for quality keywords like 'plugin', 'plug in', 'platform', shows some interesting results. Below are dice.com searches for "XXXX and (plugin OR "plug in" OR platform)" with the raw number of career postings and the percentage of jobs looking for that particular skill.

eclipse, 174, 23%
jdeveloper, 17, 14%
intellij, 7, 24%
netbeans, 6, 20%

- Don

From EclipseCon to The Server Side Symposium

As if I hadn't had enough receptions and networking events last week at EclipseCon, I went straight to The Server Side Symposium being held in Sunny Las Vegas which ran from Thursday through the weekend.

This was the first year that I noticed booths at The Server Side symposium, and it was great to see a number of different companies demoing their products that are built on Eclipse. The one that really stuck in my mind was Adobe Flex Builder 2.0 beta. Some seriously flashy (all puns intended) stuff is easily created with that tool. Gavin King had a session on Seam running in, of course, Eclipse. The Oracle team was on hand to talk about Dali too.

I vaguely recall playing Jeopardy and winning a USB key at an Oracle reception one night. Everyone kept saying "Merry Christmas" to me the next day, and I can't remember why. ;)

Gee... Did I actually leave EclipseCon, or did we just move the party to Vegas when I wasn't looking!!! :-)

- Don

EclipseCon day 2 keynote - Validation of an idea from Greg Stein of Apache

As I blogged before, one of my favorite conferences is the Colorado Software Summit. Wayne Kovsky has nailed the right mix of quality people, content, location and "marketing free" attitude. Unfortunately, leaving Oracle and focusing on business development at Eclipse has kind of left me in a bit of a bind - I can't in good concious submit sessions on the technologies that I've moved on from. However, after mulling it around back in January, and seeing a session from Cliff Schmidt at Apache on "open source licensing", I started to think it might be cool to submit a talk about Open Source Licensing and focusing on issues that matter to fellow developers.

There are lots of issues around Open Source licensing and lots of different license models and objectives. Developers are often pitted against managers and enter into online flame wars with other developers without having an appreciation of some of the wacky issues many companies face.

Greg's keynote today has solidified my opinion that this is an important and cool subject for developers. Greg opened the keynote with a fantastic 10 minute overview of the major kinds of software licenses, and the role each license has in industry. Validation of an idea is cool.

- Don

Bjorn is my inspiration...

Bjorn had a great post earlier tonight about how the short talks were organized, and how they were working out. Plus, in typical fasion, opening the floor to ideas on how to improve the process and there have already been some great comments.

But it was the diagram that really got me interested in the blog. I've met few people that are able to articulate sometimes complex ideas as clearly and succinctly as Bjorn. If I tried to explain the dual monitor approach in a blog, I probably would have written a 3-page manual. THEREFORE, with Bjorn as my inspiration, I'm going to explain as succinctly as possible my last two nights at EclipseCon:
Please feel free to share your own experiences in this succinct format.

- Don

Check out Brent Williams at 10:45 today in Ballroom ABGH

Brent Williams is giving a talk today on "Open Source Business Models - a View from Wall Street". Brent gave a talk yesterday afternoon to the Eclipse membership at the members meeting (about 180 attendees representing close to 100 members), and about 85% of the survey respondants picked it as their favorite invited session of the meeting.

If you're in any way involved in managing or marketing products built on or with F/OSS, you should check this out. If you're a developer who wants to try to keep your managers/marketing folks on the path to sustinance and value, you should also come :)

- Don

NetBeans comes to EclipseCon!

So it looks like NetBeans came to EclipseCon! These lovely ladies, plus a few more, were out front of the Santa Clara Convention Center and the Hyatt all morning handing out bottled water and NetBeans CD's. Mike snapped this picture of someone in Eclipse Swag with the NetBeans ladies. They were pretty popular, many people wanted their picture taken. The girls seemed to relish their popularity, although I don't think they really understood why people thought it was kinda fun that they were there.

Unfortunately, they didn't bring enough water! By the time I got there, they had run out. Apparently their managers were running out for more water. Hopefully they bring enough next time!

They say they'll be here all day tomorrow, maybe we can setup a group photo?

- Don

I hope EclipseCon starts soon, or I may go broke...

I flew in to EclipseCon last night to check out a few things and because of a few meetings I need to attend later this afternoon. I woke up early this morning and headed out for some breakfast, and before I knew it, I was knee deep in a hold'em tournament at the Bay 101 casino just down the road. I only cleared a third of the field before getting busted out (blinded out is more appropriate). Maybe next year we should organize a tourney as part of the event. ;)

EclipseCon has sold out, which was a bit of a surprise. I think some people imagine that EclipseCon is just a big "give away" conference open to members, but it's absolutely not. Not even the board of directors get passes to the show, they need to pay up like everyone else. I think the only free passes are Speakers (and only 1 per session, so multiple speakers need to draw straws :) ), the OS Pavillion Scholarship recipiants and foundation staff who are helping run things at the show.

I am really impressed with the number of RSVP's for the members-only meeting on Monday afternoon - there were close to 200 rsvps, and most of the 140 or so member organizations have at least one attendee. Should be quite the meeting!

Cheers, and looking forward to meeting everyone this week!

- Don

Why Developers should look at the EclipseCon Business Track

Back in January I gave a quick overview of the business track at EclipseCon this year, and thanks to the never-ending tweaks to the website from people like Bjorn, there is now a summary view of the track available here.

Last time I was too chicken to single out any sessions, but having met some of the speakers over the past few weeks, I'm ready to go out on a bit of a limb.

I'm hoping hard core developers will consider some of the sessions on the business track. For example, Cliff Schmidt from Apache has a session on Intellectual property law that I've been fortunate to have a glimpse of. Cliff lays out the major OSS licenses in clear and simple terms, and breaks down the issues by categories so simple, even an MBA can understand :) I think developers will find it useful not only to understand some of the "license war" discussions that crop up on discussion forums, but also to have some ammo handy if someone tries to FUD your use of any particular OSS project.

Stephen O'Grady is going to talk about "Bottom Up Marketing". I think this is good session for any developer who works on an F/OSS project (regardless whether it's part of your 'job' or not). The message is going to resound with developers, I promise ;)

EclipseCon is just two weeks away, and reservations have exceeded last year already and continues strong. Thanks to moving to a bigger location, there are no worries of selling out (as happened the last two years). You can register and see more of what's going on here.

- Don