March 16th, 2008
EclipseCon 2008: Fake Steve Jobs, Microsoft, E4, and more
EclipseCon 2008 opens Monday at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara CA. The schedule for the week includes a trio of interesting keynote speakers, a ton of technical sessions, and a tinge of controversy over the future of Eclipse development.
The first day will be taken up by tutorials, BOFs, and the Eclipse Community Awards Reception. Each day after that will start with a keynote address, followed by the technical tracks. EclipseCon has always had good keynote speakers and this year is no different. In fact I think 2008 has the best line-up yet.
Tuesday starts with Steve Jobs. Ok, not the real Steve Jobs, the fake one. Dan Lyons, tech columnist at Forbes, wrote his satirical Fake Steve Jobs blog for years before being outed by the New York Times. If anything, the revelation made him even more popular than before.
In something of an annual tradition, Microsoft is making an appearance again this year. This time, Sam Ramji, director of the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft, will deliver the keynote on Wednesday. I’m not entirely sure why they bother, but hey, everybody is welcome and the Eclipse community is nothing if not open minded and gracious.
Finally, blogger and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow will address the Eclipse faithful on Thursday. You may know Cory as the co-editor of the Boing Boing blog, or as a fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Expect him to speak out in favor of intellectual property, copy protection, DRM, and file sharing lawsuits. Er, not really.
Besides the keynotes, another draw this year will be discussions about Eclipse 4 (also known as E4). It seems the Eclipse planning council stepped in it earlier this month with a poorly worded announcement of an E4 incubator project that sparked a huge hullabaloo in the community. Well, if nothing else, the somewhat heated discussions that followed show that people are still passionate about Eclipse and about the open way in which it is developed, and that they’ll jealously guard the integrity of both.
Ed Burnette is a professional developer and author of several articles and books about computing including Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform, 2nd Edition. For disclosure of Ed's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
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