Mike Milinkovich posted an entry in his blog where he is answering Kirill Grouchnikov’s blog posting on who fixed what bugs in Eclipse 3.1.
Kirill is complaining that a lot bugs were fixed by IBM employees. IMHO such postings will never stop. But, what’s the point? Just because a company opened one of its great products and created an open source project around it doesn’t mean that they have to stop developing/supporting it.
It’s the same with OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, NetBeans, the Linux Kernel, Gnome, KDE and a lot other open source projects. All projects are supported by companies that recognized the value of these projects and are willing to provide full-time developers to improve them. Jonathan Schwartz gave a good explanation why Sun is doing this with OpenSolaris. Some companies do that with a big ballyhoo and some don’t. There are even some that hide their engagement beehind project email aliases. IBM does not. But, who cares? That’s all real open source development
The downside of a high company engagement in all those projects is that sometimes it’s hard for volunteers to gain commit rights on them because they can’t contribute full-time and their contribution might look tiny compared to the full-time committers. But you don’t always have to have commit rights. The committers and the community appreciate every single contribution, believe me. It doesn’t even have to be code. You should never give up. It’s the contribution that counts not the committer state. I’m sure you’ll find a lot projects with committers that haven’t contributed for years.
I don’t think Kirill was implying that eclipse should have no IBM engagement now that it is an open community, or even that IBM should not have the majority of committers. You’re quite correct that netbeans and other OSS projects work the same way. I agree that this is the sign of a healthy engagement with OSS on the part of corporations. However, my (and I think Kirill’s) issue is with the IBM marketing engine drawing some distinction between the Eclipse Foundation and the way NetBeans is governed, as if eclipse is “more open”. It’s not. IBM has a very healthy OSS community engagement in the eclipse codebase, and Sun has a very healthy OSS community egagement in the netbeans codebase.
It was IBM that was originally playing semantic games here. Kirill’s just reacting to that.
It puzzles me a lot to see my words continually twisted in a prejudiced way. It seems like every non-100%-pro-Eclipse blog entry directly implies complaint or negative comparison to NetBeans. Complaining about bug fixes? Really? Just saying that a lot of bugs get fixed by IBM, despite the marketing effort to downplay IBM’s lead role in Eclipse development. Do i have problem with this? No, and why should i? But i do have a problem with doing a thing and then telling that you had nothing to do with it (no matter if it’s good or bad).