I’m a big Eclipse fan. Since 2002 I’ve been promoting Eclipse inside my company and at local conferences. In 2003, I gave a Technical Overview of Eclipse platform @ Linux Bangalore Conference (now known as FOSS.IN). My claim was Eclipse is not just an IDE, its a platform to build IDEs and other interesting applications. People laughed at me saying I was fantasizing. They claimed that Eclipse was nothing more than an IDE. Anyway, time has proved that Eclipse is really a platform that has contributed a great deal to the software world.

While I continue to be a proud Eclipse supported, over the last few days Eclipse has started disappointing me. Last whole week, Eclipse kept crashing on my machine if I upgraded some Eclipse platform plugins using their update-site. Today I stumbled upon a new issue. On my Mac, when I try to launch Eclipse.app, it complains “The Eclipse executable launcher was unable to locate its companion shared library”.

It turns out that in my Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse.ini file launcher.library points to a old plugin folder that does not exist. I had to manually go and update that folder to the correct folder name (version differences).

I had to change :
–launcher.library
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.carbon.macosx_1.0.100.v20080509-1800

to

–launcher.library
../../../plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.carbon.macosx_1.0.101.R34x_v20080731

Hope these issues are resolved as soon as possible, so that end-user experience is not compromised and my faith in Eclipse does not die.

Wow! Today you can download CrossOver for Mac and Linux. You can also download CrossOver Games for Mac and Linux for free. This offer is only valid on 28th Oct 2008. Currently their main site is down, but you can download these softwares from http://down.codeweavers.com/

Enjoy!

Both, Open Space Technology (OST)* and Open Source Software (OSS) are structured around volunteerism (.i.e people are the center of the universe). They really encourage people to step up and help. Volunteerism applies at many levels.
In OSS,

• you can author a piece of software and put it out to help others OR
• you can join an existing project and contribute to it.
• you can use the software and give feedback to the authors. Filling in a bug report or requesting an enhancement is a great way to participate in this movement. There are million ways to contribute to OSS, you can write some user document for the project or give a demo to your local user group.

Similarly in OST, you can propose a topic and be a facilitator or participate in a topic proposed by someone else or blog about your thoughts.

With Volunteerism comes responsibilities and rights. You have the right to participate and contribute. If you don’t like the direction in which its going, you have the right to leave or spawn off something that is how you would like it. This very behavior leads to exploration and discovery. Hence leads to innovation. While the participants have all these rights, they are generally good citizens and are very responsible & self-disciplined. You can really see a touch of craftsmanship in their work.

In my experience both these approaches are amazing at how they can involve/engage people. In OST we say,

“Who ever comes it the right people and whatever happens is the best that can happen”.

This holds true for OSS projects as well. You can’t really force somebody to contribute. Based on my experience the core for both is passionate people.

From the outside, both OST and OSS looks very chaotic in nature. One has to act, sense and respond. When someone throws open a piece of software, they have no idea how it would evolve or even if it will interest anyone. They have to act first by putting it out there. After that based on the feedback from the community (sense), the author/s have to respond. Project which are able to do this, see a big user community around it and hence innovation. Same holds good for OST topics.

Even though we try to put some (very limited) structure around them, both OST and OSS by nature are very self-organizing, self-emerging and self-adjusting or self-correcting. They also have a self-filtering nature. Its easy to leave non-passionate and undisciplined people behind. Nor are these hero-centric systems. Also the moment we try to put too much structure or process around them, they tend to break down. They don’t necessarily fail, but evolve into something very different in nature and the kind of people around it. In OST we say,

“It starts when it starts, it ends when it ends”.

Topics in OST and features in OSS evolve over a period of time. One thing influences another and another influences some third thing. This very nature makes it very adaptive. Adaptive systems are here to stay, rigid systems will soon be extinct.

* Don’t get confused with the word Technology in OST. In this context Technology means tool. Its really a meeting/conference format.