2014 Candidate:
John Arthorne

I have had the privilege of representing my fellow committers on the Eclipse Board of Directors for the past two years. It has been an interesting year for the board, with several intense discussions about the future of the Eclipse Foundation and its technologies. The original Eclipse platform continues to be the basis for many other projects and commercial products, but lacks sufficient levels of contribution to maintain its dominant position in the software tools ecosystem. The board has examined this problem closely and continues to work with Eclipse Foundation staff to address it. I have been an active participation in these discussions both in public and within the board, and I continue to work to encourage contribution to the Eclipse platform and to reduce real or perceived barriers to contribution in any way I can.

Meanwhile, the Eclipse Foundation continues to grow and diversify. It is clear that the Eclipse Foundation has moved beyond its IDE roots to become a home for a wide array of technologies across many domains. I am especially excited to see Eclipse growing into technologies beyond Java, and to move into growing domains such as Internet of Things and browser-based tools. If re-elected I will continue to encourage the foundation to diversify into these new domains. The core strength of the Eclipse Foundation is not in any single specific technology, but in its neutral governance model, and in its strong focus on clean intellectual property. Today most open source projects are born on forge sites where there is no clear governance and little or no support for IP management. Many of these projects will eventually mature and realize they need the services of foundations such as Eclipse, and we need to ensure the Eclipse Foundation is ready to take them in.

Many of the processes and services provided by the Eclipse Foundation continue to focus on annual releases of a Java-based IDE and related tools. While this remains an important segment of Eclipse projects, we need to ensure the Eclipse Foundation can provide value to projects written in other languages, and that have much more frequent release schedules. We need a more adaptable development process that can be changed to meet the needs of new projects. We need to provide build, test, and download infrastructure for software other than OSGi bundles. The Eclipse Foundation serves its existing projects very well, but needs to adapt to provide useful services and infrastructure for the next big technology as well. These are goals I will work towards in the coming year if re-elected to the Board for another term.