2009 Candidate:
Shawn Pearce

The Eclipse Project is an important focal point in open source Java development communities due to the high quality of its many projects. My goals for the Eclipse Foundation are to expand upon this position and attract more contributors and collaborators.

To do this I will:

• Encourage more collaboration with the Apache Software Foundation
• Ensure a future for Java by improving collaboration with OpenJDK
• Recommend increased usage of modern infrastructure tools, reducing contributor pain points

The ASF also produces high quality projects, many of which are consumed by Eclipse as part of the platform. Collaboration and code sharing needs to be simple for contributors, to prevent wide spread replication of effort. The Eclipse Foundation should work with ASF to reduce the IP review required prior to bringing in ASF managed works.

Eclipse and its consumers rely upon J2SE runtimes. OpenJDK represents a major leap forward in ensuring the Java platform will always be available. The Eclipse Foundation has a vested interested in maintaining the viability of the Java platform, and should encourage contribution to and the widespread deployment of open J2SE systems.

New contributors, like Google Summer of Code students, are often road-blocked on gaining commit access to repositories. Modern distributed systems often alleviate this by permitting change recording at outside locations until IP agreements can be finished and access granted. As the Eclipse Foundation and its members are very careful with their IP review processes, the foundation needs to encourage use of tools that make it easier for newcomers to enter the ecosystem and meet the requirements, without losing effort, history, or becoming frustrated and leaving.

At Google, Shawn is committed to fostering the growth of the open source ecosystem by supporting existing programs such as Google Summer of Code, and the development of new communities, like the Android Open Source Project. Prior to joining Google, Shawn lead a development team at Bank of America building domain-specific plugins for the Eclipse platform.

Outside of work, Shawn is an active contributor in the Git community, pushing the limits of distributed development tools.