Eclipse Summit Europe Day Three: Sessions and Chats

I stated the morning with Jörg Sievert's talk about what venture capitalists like about open source. The money of course! You might wonder how giving something away for free can be a good business model, but there are certainly enough examples where building an open source community is the best way to gain market dominance and that in and of itself generates value...

After the session I had a very nice chat with Brandon Ulrich and Balazs Banfai of B2 International about their use of EMF in the Open Healthcare Framework. They really appreciated Marcelo's help with their SOC project. Meeting people and understanding the issues they face is half the fun at these conferences!


I managed to track down Tom Schindl again too. He didn't try to run or hide.


Tom is self employed and hence gets to work on whatever he chooses. That must be cool! I asked him why he's so incredibly helpful on the newsgroups and so generous with sharing his cool work. He explained that he learned a great deal from the platform code and benefits so much from the help of folks like Boris Bokowski and other platform committers that he feels compelled to give back in return. So as the old saying goes, what goes around comes around. Sharing and being helpful tends to make other folks share and be helpful, so when there is such an obvious return on investment with folks like Tom, it helps to induce and even stronger feedback loop. That's what makes Eclipse such a great community. I was going to take a cell sample so we could clone him (under the EPL license of course) but I suspect there are laws against that.

As Wayne noted in his blog, I spent a lot of time chatting with folks, though perhaps he over emphasized the talking verses the listening. Several people expressed their gratitude for the help they got on newsgroups. I'm always tempted to say "Don't take it personally, I help everyone" but you have to be careful that a humorous comment isn't misinterpreted.

In the evening, I had dinner with a few of the folks who didn't have to leave immediately, like Lynn, Don and Gunnar, so that finished off the day very nicely. All in all it was a most excellent event!

I'm already looking forward to OSSummit Asia and of course the next EclipseCon. Speaking of which, I'm going to have to span all the modeling newsgroups to call for EclipseCon submissions. It's that time of the year again!