Back to Oracle!

Summary: I’ve loved my last five years at the Eclipse Foundation. It’s time for me to move on. I’m going to Oracle to work on OpenJDK and other things.

The longer version:

It was over five years ago that I joined the Eclipse Foundation. I had just finished an MBA and was working at Oracle in a well regarded technical swat team in Java middleware. The Eclipse Foundation had launched in my hometown of Ottawa, and here I was, eager to learn about open source, the rapidly changing business model of enterprise software, ecosystems and to do something fresh. So I took advantage of this unique opportunity and convinced Mike that I should help run the Eclipse Foundation membership.

My 5+ years at Eclipse were incredibly rewarding both personally and professionally. I’ve made countless new friends and acquaintances from all the organizations that I’ve had the pleasure of working with. I was privileged to be working directly with many great thinkers in the software industry, and learning about how big ideas, like Eclipse, happen.

All the staff at the Eclipse Foundation that I’ve ever worked with have been high performing and maniacal about driving the Eclipse Ecosystem forward. I believe the Eclipse Foundation has done great things by helping hundreds of organizations keep pace with evolving business models and to make available a lot of high value free software. I leave the Eclipse Foundation with complete respect and admiration for every single person there. They do incredible things with limited resources and many constraints. I will continue to be a fierce advocate and supporter of all things Eclipse.

I believe strongly that we are at the beginning of a renaissance period for Java. Once again there is real investment and participation in Java. There is a roadmap that has an immediate impact with Java SE 7, and plans far into the future – with many organizations and stakeholders keen to see it happen. Moreover, I’m convinced that once a world class modularity solution becomes part of core Java, we will see even more and faster innovation. It means great things from the biggest cloud, to the smallest device.

I have a matching skill set to help Java evolve for the decade to come, so I decided to jump at an opportunity to join the Oracle Java SE team. I will be working with OpenJDK and other things. I am truly proud to be working with folks like Dalibor Topic, Henrik Staal, Mark Reinhold and Adam Messinger.

The team I’m on has one simple mandate – keep Java the number one computing platform in the world. Period. I start May 9th, and will post some pointers when I land.

- Don