Mike Milinkovich

Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation

1. Great technology
2. Broad adoption
3. Architecture of participation
4. Being hijacked by a fanatical community

Keypoints

• You need a cathedral to enable the bazaar
• Low barriers to entry
• New addons are first class citizens, not second class

The Eclipse Experience

• Open extensible architecture
• Built out of layers and plugins
• Everything is a plugin both from the cathedral and the bazaar

Open Source Community that wants to have commercial adoption

• Only project that meets it's dates religiously
• Quality matters
• Shipping 10 different projects on the same day
  • 10 million lines of code
  • 25 corporate interests
  • 30 locations
  • all shipping a suite of tools, applications and platforms
• Planning council getting together and deciding that this mass release would be worth coordinating
• New Eclipse projects are trying to get on the "release train"
  • this is something to aspire to
  • there is a social cred to being part of this
• 3.1 launch required that normal 50Mb connection be upgraded to 200Mb (wow!)
  • expecting to outbandwidth most of the Pr0n websites
  • for the first year of Eclipse the only infrastructure capable of mirroring was the Pr0n mirrors
• Brand Hijack by Alex Wipperfurth
• Culting of Brands by Douglas Atkin
  • for more information about stuff like this, check out Tara Hunt's Pinko Marketing

Winning Communities require letting go

• IBM realized that to win is that they needed to let go
• Anti-thesis of traditional marketing
• Let the community take over
• Be spontaneous fun

Anatomy of a Community

• from the outside it looks like one big community
• if you go inside there are very distinct groups
  • Committers - Build a great platform
  • Plugin developers - Extend the Platform to do cool stuff
  • Users - What a great hammer! Now if only I can find a nail

The value of a community is proportional to the number of functioning members.