Good crop of winners in Eclipse Community Awards

Yesterday was the first day of EclipseCon, and I spent the afternoon in the Annual General Meeting of Eclipse Membership. This is where you hear people like Mike Milinkovich discuss the plans for the Foundation moving forward. New members are also introduced around, there are discussions of marketing, and so-on.

An important part of the meeting was a discussion of the forthcoming Europa “simultaneous release,” scheduled for June 29. According to Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Europa is on track. Milestone 5 came out on Feb. 24, and Milestone 6, which locks down the APIs, is set for Apr. 7. Currently, there are 25 projects set for inclusion in the Europa event; that’s an ever-changing number.

There was a bit of unexpected news: Skip McGaughey, one of the prime movers of the Eclipse movement, will be retiring from the Eclipse Foundation at the end of May. He was given a great T-shirt that said something like, “I helped create a multi-billion-dollar ecosystem and all I got was a lousy T-shirt.”

The Members Meeting often includes interesting talks by outside experts, and yesterday was no exception. There were two this year. Brent C. Williams, a financial analyst, talked about the evolution of the open source business model. James Governor, a principal at analyst firm Redmonk, shared his advice for future directions of the Eclipse community.

After the Members Meeting ended, it was time for the second annual Eclipse Community Awards; as one of the judges, I was asked to participate in the ceremony.

The winners fell into two broad categories: individuals within the Eclipse community; these were chosen by ballot; and products/companies, chosen by outside judges (like me).

The Individual Award Winners this year were:

Top Ambassador: Chris Aniszczyk
Top Contributor: Kimberley Peter and Tom Schindl (tie)
Top Committer: Ed Merks
Top Newcomer Evangelist: Daniel Megert

The Technology Awards went to:

Best Open Source RCP application: PSICAT
Best Commercial RCP application: TIBCO Business Studio
Best Open Source Eclipse-based Developer tool: eclipse-cs Checkstyle Plugin
Best Commercial Eclipse-based Developer tool: QNX Momentics IDE
Best Deployment of Eclipse technology in an enterprise: JPMorgan Chase

Congratulations to the winners! I’ll be back down at EclipseCon again today.