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:: 2003/05/01 ::

Lessons from Eclipse

I had the opportunity to hear Erich Gamma, of IBM OTI, speaking at the Cutter Summit in Boston this past Monday on the lessons to learn from the Eclipse open source project, which were many and varied. Relative to my interests in online communities, and leaving aside the many other things to be gleaned, he offered a few great insights.

In Eclipse, only those chosen by existing 'commiters' -- people with the right to directly commit changes to the source -- can gain access to the source. This means that the reputation that people build up through finding bugs and recommending changes to the source is key.

However, this would seem to lead to a situation where the commiters would be swamped with requests for information, and responding to questions -- since the Eclipse project is totally open, and has no 'customer support' group. However, what has happened is that the community of knowledgeable users and participants field the overwhelming majority of questions that aries, and the commiters as a result only have to fiddle with the few issues that the community can't handle.

This corroborates again the power of involved and participating communities. Gamma also mentioned that the burden of keeping the feedback cycles to the community falls on the sponsoring organization. Which reminds me, I have to reply to several comments that folks left on my Darwin article...

:: Stowe Boyd 5/1/2003 12:36:57 PM [link] ::
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