How do we do it?
We tax for committership!
Seriously?
Let’s charge 300 bucks!
Nooooo!
On one hand, the investment into the Eclipse IDE of existing, long-time contributors is declining. There might be plenty of reasons for that. But over time, this decline in investment has become visible to the users of Eclipse – developers that use it every day to get their job done. Personally, I’m missing innovation in things that really makes up a great IDE. Well, some might say that innovation happens in the web these days. Desktop IDEs are boring.
Really? Because on the other hand, there are many companies out there which are spending quite a bit of money on licenses for commercial desktop IDEs every year! Thus, I’m wondering if some of those companies would rather spend a similar amount or a bit less on Eclipse? Do you care about developers? Imagine there is a team of experienced people with a great vision on the Eclipse IDE available that is seeking for funding. Imagine that with your funding, you can not only contribute to a sustainable future of the Eclipse IDE but also participate in making decisions on how this future should look like. Now I’m telling you, that you don’t even need to hire developers for that!
This idea of leveraging an industry working group for bringing the Eclipse IDE forward has been circulating around for some time now. I finally sat down and put together a proposal for an Eclipse IDE industry working group.
Industry working groups at Eclipse are an easy way for companies to efficiently work together on a common goal. I’m looking for feedback and interested parties! Does that idea sound interesting? What aspects of the proposal do you like and which not at all? How much would you be willing to spend? What kind of participation do you like? What is missing and should be covered?
There are plenty of questions. Please don’t hesitate and reach out to me (@guw or gunnar at wagenknecht dot org) or subscribe to the ide-dev mailing list and join our discussions! There are also two interesting sessions at EclipseCon Europe that you should join: Making the Eclipse IDE fun again and an Eclipse IDE BoF.