2011 Candidate:
Hans Kamutzki
Managing Director, MicroDoc
Nominee for Contributing Member representative
MicroDoc has been an Eclipse add-in member for many years and Eclipse is a core element of MicroDoc's company strategy. MicroDoc has donated "Java Bindings for OpenVG", a vector grafics library for mobile devices, to the eRCP project. Hans currently serves his second term as a Sustaining Member Representative on the Board of Directors of the Eclipse Foundation and is a member of the Eclipse Finance Commitee.
| email: | hka at microdoc.com |
Vision
Serving as an Sustaining Member Representative on the Board of Directors of the Eclipse Foundation in my second term, I clearly see a number of significant challenges and opportunities for the Eclipse Ecosystem, which I want continue to work on in the Eclipse Board:
Membership: Even though the Board has introduced a number of improvements to the membership model, there's still work to do. The current membership model still makes it hard for many companies to justify payment of the membership fees to the Eclipse foundation ("why pay for something we can get for free anyway?"). My vision for the Eclipse membership model is to generate more immediate membership value for a large number of small and mid sized companies (committers and consumers), while keeping the large companies interested in staying in the foundation. In my opinon, some of the foundation's offerings (like the option to get long term support for outdated releases) should become "members only" benefits, while others (like joining a project) should remain open for anybody who complies with the rules of the foundation. This will make the Eclipse Foundation more robust against economic threats caused by member fluctuation. I also want to work on a program that motivates the community members to more actively participate in the development of the eco-system and the foundation.
Visibility and representation: Im my vision for Eclipse, the foundation will designate a dedicated evangelist whose sole responsibility is to publicly represent the Eclipse in the software community and beyond. Even if budgetary constraints don't allow to hire someone now, this is still a goal which should be pursued for the near future.
Technology: It is essential to maintain, and possibliy expand the momentum that Eclipse has in the Java world. At the same time, Eclipse has to open up for new technologies to stay on top of the commercial open source movement. The core strength of Eclipse (managed IP progress, well governed open source projects) can be propagated to virtually any significant up to date IT technology. So my vision is to see the Eclipse project moving into new technology domains like JavaScript etc.
About the Candidate
Hans Kamutzki is co-founder and Managing Director of MicroDoc. He studied Physics and Computer Science in Bonn and Munich, Germany and focused on realtime image processing and process control in the early days of his professional work. For a "device and algorithm for the automatic detection of objects" he was co-awarded a German and European patent. After many years of development and project management practice in Smalltalk and Java, Hans now runs the Embedded Java operations at MicroDoc.
Affiliation
MicroDoc is a software consultancy and product development business founded in 1991 by Hendrik Hoefer and Hans Kamutzki. In the 90s, MicroDoc's focus was on object oriented programming with Smalltalk. Hans Kamutzki was a main contributor to a MicroDoc product called "Objects for Notes", a technical Smalltalk to Lotus Notes gateway that was licensed to IBM in 1995. He worked as a technical and operational liaison between MicroDoc and IBM and spent several months with integration work in the RTP labs in Raleigh, NC and on other lab engagements. Even before Java became mainstream, MicroDoc invested in this technology and provided a number of product components to the international market of reusable components. Among these products are Java based persistence frameworks, an EJB persistency container and a variety of migration and quality assurance tools as well as some contributions to IBM's VisualAge for Java product. MicroDoc's work with Eclipse started in 2002 with an IDE migration project for a large airline. Eclipse has become a universal tool within MicroDoc since then. Eclipse is used as a development platform, but also heavily as a runtime environment for RCP and eRCP clients and server applications. As MicroDoc is building end to end solutions (starting on the mainframe and scaling down to mobile and embedded devices), the Eclipse RCP/eRCP platforms are essential building blocks for harmonizing the architecture in many MicroDoc projects today. As a Managing Directory, Hans is in charge for the embedded Java business as well as legal and contractual matters within MicroDoc today.