We have now launched the 2012 edition of the Eclipse Community Survey.   I’d like to invite everyone in the Eclipse community to complete the survey.   The survey should take 5-10 minutes to complete so it shouldn’t be too time consuming.   As an extra incentive, participants can enter a draw to win a pass to EclipseCon Europe 2012 or EclipseCon NA 2013 and some Eclipse SWAG.  In June, we will publish a complete report of the survey results.

Thank you in advanced to everyone that does fill out the survey.  The deadline to complete the survey is May 15, 2012.

However, this blog post The New Open Source Superpower is pretty shocking in the lack of understanding of the  role of OSS Foundations.  Therefore, I feel compelled to point out some of its errors:

1. OSS Foundations are not the (super)powers or even the heart of any OSS community.  OSS Foundations are service providers to a community.   If the community is not engaged, the Foundation has no use.   I am pretty sure the Linux Foundation doesn’t claim credit for Linux.  They support Linus, the kernel maintainers and the entire Linux community.  Same thing for the Eclipse Foundation and I am sure the Apache Foundation.  OSS Foundations are about servicing a community, not being a superpower.

2. The blog gets the role of OSS Foundation marketing completely wrong.  The power of OSS Foundations is community marketing, not a large marketing budget.   We have a very small (less than $500K) marketing budget at Eclipse.   However, we get a huge multiplier from our community.   The Open Stack Foundation needs to enable community marketing, not be the center of Open Stack marketing.   I’d also point out that a $5 million marketing budget is peanuts to what Open Stack competitors will potentially spend on marketing.

3. Finally the blog has this statement ‘Open source is heavily driven by marketing.’   All I can say is wow, just wow.   OSS is about code, developers, adopters and users. It is about community.  It is NOT about marketing.  I don’t know anyone in an OSS community that would actually think marketing is the driver.

I do realize this blog is not the official statement of the Open Stack community or Foundation.   It is exciting to see the progress they are making forming the Foundation.   I do hope they don’t overstate the importance of the Foundation.   For Open Stack to be successful it has to be about the code and the community.

We have published a summary of all the session feedback.   There were some speakers that obviously hit a home run with their talk.   These top speakers had more than 20 attendees voting and a significant majority of the votes were +1.  Congratulations to our top EclipseCon Speakers:

1. Donne Berkholz – Assholes are killing your project
2. Marcel Bruch – Eclipse Code Recommenders – Code Completion on Steroids
3. William Swanson and Marc Khouzam  – Seeing is Understanding: Debugging with the Multicore Visualizer
4. Maximillian Koegel – What every Eclipse Developer should know about EMF
5. Tim Ward – Best Practices for (Enterprise) OSGi applications
6. Tom Schindl -  e(fx)clipse – Eclipse Tooling and Runtime for JavaFX
7. Holger Staudacher – Effective Mockito in a modular world
8. Marc Hoffman – Code Coverage Revised: EclEmma on JaCoCo
9. Shawn Pearce – Harnessing Peer Code Reviews
10. Sven Efftinge – Eclipse Xtend – A Language Made for Java Developers
11. Jean-Michel Lemieux – From 98 days to 1 – our continuous deployment pivot
12. Kevin Sawicki and Matthias Sohn – News from Git in Java Land
13. Tom Schindl – The Eclipse 4 Application Platform explained
14. Karsten Thoms – Spraying – a quick way to create Graphitis
15. Steffen Pingel and Benjamin Muskalla – Build, Stage, Review, merge: Task-focused Development the Eclipse Mylyn Way

There a  lot of other really great speakers and sessions.  Thank you to all the speakers who took the time to making EclipseCon a great technical conference.

A couple of important last minute notes:

1. Please take the time to complete the attendee feedback survey.   We really use this to improve the future conferences.  Thanks to everyone who already provided feedback.

2. If you haven’t already, please provide feedback on each session you attended.  The speakers value this type of feedback and we will use it for future program committees.

3. Speakers please please upload your presentations to the conference web site.  One of the most common request we get is ‘Where are the slides?’   To make it easy, we have a link to all the sessions that have posted their slides.

Feel free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail on what we should be doing for future EclipseCon conferences.  We hope to see you next year or at EclipseCon Europe 2012 on October 23-25.

A couple of reminders:

1. We have a great line up of products for our New Product Showcase but we still have room for a few more.  If you have released a new Eclipse-based product in 2011, feel free to participate.

2. The EclipseCon web site lets you build your own schedule.  Just sign-in and then start selecting the sessions you want to attend.   You can also see the most popular sessions.

3. This year we are also going to be collecting feedback on each session via the EclipseCon web site.  After you attend each session, please remember to select the ‘Evaluate’ button and provide the feedback.

4. Don’t forget to register!   It always amazes me how many people register the last week.  We will have on-site registration but the price will be going up after Friday, so if you are coming register now!

I look forward to seeing old friends and meeting new friends next week in Reston.

United States
Canada
Germany
France
United Kingdom
Switzerland
Sweden
Austria
Bulgaria
Denmark
Brazil
Japan
Russia
Norway
South Korea
Italy
India
Australia
Estonia
Egypt
Spain
Turkey
Netherlands
Poland
Sri Lanka
Belgium
Czech Republic
South Africa
Slovenia
Pakistan
Hungary
Ireland
Israel

In past years, Eclipse content has been light but from a brief twitter conversation with some key Oracle Java folks there seems to be some desire to change that.

@IanSkerrett @Sharat_Chander Would love to see more #eclipse submissions this year, last year was virtually nil.Can you help us with that?

— DonaldOJDK (@DonaldOJDK) March 14, 2012

@IanSkerret I’d love to see JavaOne CFP submissions from the broad and talented #Java community, including those part of #Eclipse community!

— Sharat (@Sharat_Chander) March 14, 2012

I realize a lot of people are preparing for the absolute best conference of the year but you might also start thinking about JavaOne. It would be great to feature a lot of the cool stuff people are doing in the Eclipse community.  Deadline for submissions is April 9th.

Thanks to Jonas Helming, the Top Coder will have to be proficient at using Eclipse but with no keyboard.  Also thanks to Microsoft and EclipseSource for sponsoring the Top Coder competition. It should be a lot of fun!

UDPATE: Turns out there is a company, called TopCoders Inc., that run developer competitions.  To be clear, this game is not associated with that company and I will be looking for a new name.

• CDT Summit – for individuals and organizations contributing to the CDT project.
• M2M Industry Working Group – M2M IWG is a collaboration of organization building tools and platforms for machine-to-machine and the Internet of Things.
• Polarsys Working Group – organizations interested in embedded software tool chains and tools for safety critical software development.
• Automotive Working Group – a collaboration of organization in the automotive industry interested in define a common tool chain for automotive software development.
• Common Build Infrastructure – an initiative combining technologies and practices for building Eclipse Software.
• Long Term Support – a collaboration to allow organization to maintain versions of Eclipse for a very long time

We will also be having the annual Eclipse Membership meeting on Monday, March 26 from 3-5pm.

These meetings are intended for people actively involved in the projects or collaborations.  They are working meetings, not typical conference presentations.  If you would like to participate, please contact the meeting organizer.  If you are planning a meeting or would like to plan a meeting, please let me know and we will try to arrange a room  (Rooms are limited so I can’t guarantee it.)

Denis and I decided to do some research.  First, Denis did all the checks to make sure we weren’t getting a denial of service.  During a sample 24 hours period the IP address with the most downloads was an address at Samsung in Korea; they downloaded Eclipse 89 times.  It really doesn’t look like someone is trying to take our site down.

I then did some analysis of our Google Analytics stats.   Comparing the stats from February 2011 with the stats from February 2012 a trend starts to emerge.

• Overall visits have increased from 2.5 million to 3.2 million and unique visitors has increased from 1.6 million to 2 million.  Roughly a 25% increase in overall traffic.
• Traffic from Asia has increased 46%.  We now get more traffic from Asia than the Americas.  Americas traffic is up 19% and Europe 23%. Europe is our #1 region.
• Traffic from China is up 80%, India 52% and South Korea 30%, interesting Spain is up 28%.

Understanding the reason is not all the easy but there are a few indications.

• developer.android.com is the #1 referral of traffic to eclipse.org and overall our #3 source of traffic.  Overall traffic from this site increased overall 35%.  Traffic originating from India increased by 93% and China 3800% (A case of small numbers, in Feb 2011 there were 183 actual visits and in Feb. 2012 it rose to 7,255)
• Searches from baidu (Chinese search engine) rose 179% and baidu is now the #4 source of traffic. Searches from Google increased 37% and those Google search from India rose 74%.
• To give credit, bing search has increase 51% and is now #8 source of traffic.  stackoverflow.com rose 103% and is now #9.

It certainly seems like Android development is driving some of the increased traffic but certainly not all of it.  It really appears Eclipse is becoming very popular in China, India and South Korea.  I would love to have more insight into why?  We don’t have many connections into these countries, particularly China and Korea, so it would be nice to hear direct from the Eclipse community in these countries.   What can we at the Foundation do to help better support these countries?  It would also be great to get more mirrors located in these countries so you would have faster downloads and our bandwidth would be saved.

Feel free to leave a comment or send me an e-mail (ian.skerrett@eclipse.org)

UPDATE: A nice wiki site for the Eclipse community in South Korea http://eclipse.or.kr/