Friday, March 9, 2007

Last Day of EclipseCon

Today was the last day for EclipseCon. It took a few ibuprofens to eliminate the effects of last night's awesome party. We found out during Mike's closing remarks at the end of the day that we'd spent roughly $2867.32 at the bar. Slightly short of our $3,000 spending limit. I hope this sets a precedent for future years that awards winners will have an open party for the community rather than an exclusive party for their buddies.

Marcelo and I missed the keynote, which apparently was the best one of the three from what I heard. We were preparing for our 10:00 talk about our experience porting to Java 5.0. Darn!

Marcelo has the pictures that Dave took at our talk but he, Dave, and Nick had to go home before I would fetch them from his camera. Our talk went okay, but I babbled far too much doing the intro slides, which cut into Marcelo's more interesting air time. I'll bet next time he'll not be so keen to let me talk! Afterwards Joseph Darcy from Sun introduced himself and gave us some very helpful advice. I was really impressed that he was so helpful. He might even help find out about fixing that bug in String.offsetByCodepoints in the Sun 5.0 JDK. Too cool!

I found out that it pays to blog, because the TOPCASED guys told me they read my blog about chatting with Boris about EMF data binding support. Apparently they have a prototype they are willing to contribute, so that's just too cool. They're a great bunch of guys and I'm really looking forward to working more with them.

I went to Ian's Europa marketing meeting to find out how we can help. It would be really cool to have quantitative measurements to back up the assertion that Europa will be the biggest coordinated simultaneous software release ever. We had to leave early to attend Martin's talk.


The audience was waiting in anticipation.


He did an excellent job presenting the material. It's very impressive what he has done and I heard a number of people expression that sentiment. He, Shaun, and Stefan are planning to pool their effort and Martin wants to add Stefan as a committer to Teneo so I will try to help make that happen.

I was on the closing PMC panel discussion which was a lot of fun. This EclipseCon was the best one yet. I suppose each year will always just get better and better. There was just so much interest in modeling this year. It's great to see more and more familiar faces as the community continues to multiply rapidly. I'm already looking forward to Eclipse Summit Europe...

Given that we have to head back to where it's -25 degrees Celsius we decided to sit out on the patio. Something we won't do back home for quite a few months.

Steve Northover, SWT god, came out and I got a big f*** you from him. This guy really has such an eloquent way to express his terms of endearment. He's a brilliant guy too. He's figured out how to make money directly from open source: pan handling at the conference...


I asked Stefan and Shaun to pose in front of the fountain, and he said, oh my goodness, this is the second time you are photographing us together. People might think we're an item. Hehehe!


Bernd invited us to the Eclipse Summit Europe dinner. The food was excellent.


Ralph stopped by to chat, and he paid for the drinks. Thanks Ralph! I'll bet you'll help organize an awesome event in Germany again this year.


Everyone really enjoyed the dinner.


After this, I said goodbye to most of the people and had a nice swim down in the pool. What a great time I've had. Tomorrow I present the same talk I did on Tuesday at IBM's Almaden research lab; it's open to the public, so it will be cool to see who shows up. After that I head up to Vancouver to visit my family before heading home to Vancouver on Tuesday.

I hope folks have enjoyed the blogs.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Too bad I missed the $3000 alcohol spree. Oh well, 3 beers and 2 white Russians got me drunk enough to miss Herbert Thompson's keynote by half an hour. At least I saw Erric Gamma and Ward Cunningham from 5 feet away. And how can I forget EMF BoF where I've met all great folks who make EMF possible and especially you Ed, who restlessly and with great speed answers all EMF questions that we mortals have.

Anonymous said...

Congrats! You've been quoted about Robert Lefkowitz's talk:
http://www.v3.crn.com/software/197800997

They must have done some editing, though, since your quote reads pretty much like a moderation summary on Slashdot. ;-)

I just hope that you didn't mean to imply that you agreed with him. His talk was no doubt meant to provoke thought, and it's never a bad thing to have our assumptions challenged.

But there were just a few too many leaps of logic for my liking. In particular, his claim about the market-dictated inferiority of open source software assumes all software purchasing decisions are rational and based on the technology. He fails to account for factors like familiarity, network effects, lock-in, and good old fashioned FUD.

- Dave

Ed Merks said...

My edited follow up comment was that "It seemed ironic to argue the premise that open source software has no value because it's given away free to an audience where most people believe the exact opposite to be true."

Anonymous said...

Who of us remembers buying Windows '95 (and other software). Sorry, just because you bought it doesn't give it real value!!! Buying a piece of c$^% doesn't mean they are going to fix it soon either.

Open Source is way cool and EMF rocks!