Posted
1 day
ago
Chris Aniszcyk has written how we have been doing more to solicit financial donations from the community. In particular, we’ve added the Donate Now buttons to our download pages; which happen to be our high traffic pages. Chris raises a good
... [More]
question on how far we should go with our ‘pan handling’ and I encourage everyone to provide feedback.
However, I am also interested in what is considered to be a successful open source fundraising campaign? How much money should we be able to raise; from how many people? Wikipedia’s multi-million annual campaign is at the extreme end. I also noticed the GNOME community raised $25,000 this past year, up from $6400 the previous year. Therefore, I thought it might be useful to share our results since mid-July.
Over a period of July 17 – Nov. 30 we have raised US$9916 from 601 individuals.
We typically get on average 3 donations per day and the average donation is $21-$24.
The donations are pre-predominately from Europeans and North Americans
What are we doing to accomplish these results?
We have a Friends of Eclipse program that people can join for $35. ‘Friends’ get direct access to the Foundation download servers which in practice gives them 24hr jump on a new release. The Friends program is an annual commitment, so we actively ask for renewals.
In July, we added the Donate Now buttons to the download pages. As Chris describes they are also being added in other places on the site. The first iteration of the Donate Now buttons were $2, $10, $20. After 4 weeks, we changed the $2 to $5. After the change, the average donation went from $8 to the current $21-$24, number of donors dropped considerably but the overall revenue raised only increase slightly
The closest thing we have done to a ‘marketing campaign’ for donations was before the Galileo release encouraging people to become Friends to get early access. Overall though we are pretty modest on promoting the fundraising; so far no banner ads or pop-ups.
Some questions I have:
We quote in US$. Does it make a difference to allow the donor to quote in their local currency?
Wikipedia seems to do an annual campaign. Are campaigns that last for 1-2 months the key for getting more donors or do you have a constant appeal for donors.
How important are the benefits of the ‘Friends’ program. For instance, if we added a t-shirt but raised the price to $50 would we net more money? What other benefits have organizations offered.
Are there ‘magic’ words to use in the appeal that will attract more donors?
There you have it? I am interested in knowing what other groups have experienced or done. What are the best practices for open source fundraising. I certainly don’t claim we are a great model but I am hoping that by sharing our experiences we can get better.
Oh btw, Eclipse is a great community, lots of dedicated, hard working individuals, producing awesome, fantastic open source software. I’d like to thank everyone that has already donated to make Eclipse an even better place. It would be great to have even more people donating money back to the community. Please DONATE NOW.
[Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
In this blog post I’ll show you some Eclipse RCP example applications that you can use to explore the Eclipse RCP platform.
RCP Mail 2.0
RCP Mail 2.0 is an enhanced version of the “RCP Mail” template which comes with Eclipse.
... [More]
It was created by Michael Scharf, Kai Toedter, Boris Bokowski, Francis Upton IV, Frank Gerhardt and Paul Webster for their EclipseCon 2009 tutorial “RCP Mail 2.0: Commands, Common Navigator, and Data Binding ”. The project is currently in discussion for inclusion as an official example, see bug #253105 and #290029.
It shows best practices for RCP features like Commands, Handlers, Data Binding, Common Navigator and Branding.
To setup the project, download the sources from the RCP Mail 2.0 site. In /steps/handout you’ll find some instructions. Just import the projects from the archive file using Import > Existing projects into Workspace. Choose to import rcpmail-99 and execute the included launch configuration rcpmail-99.launch.
RSSOwl Feed reader
If you’re want to have a look at a real Eclipse RCP application that still is manageable in size, check out the RSSOwl News reader. It’s written by Benjamin Pasero. This news feed reader is entirely built on the Eclipse RCP platform. The code is pretty readable and well-structured and documented. Worth mentioning is that the application uses an embedded db4o object database to store its data. This database is accessed from application-internal DAO objects. Also, a Lucene search index is kept for all feeds and can be searched in the application.
To play around with the code, go to the RSSOwl Developer resources page and check out the project from the SVN repository. Import the plug-in and feature projects in your local workspace. Launch the application from org.rssowl.ui/Launch RSSOwl 2.0.launch
MP3 Manager
MP3 Manager is a music player example application written by Kai Tödter. He went to great lengths to use each and every feature of the Eclipse RCP platform. Especially worth mentioning are the p2 enabled headless build, changing the language dynamically using a workbench restart, using the Presentation API to customize the look and feel, having different brandings, many different use cases of JFace viewers, using the property views, providing a native Windows installer and lots and lots more.
To setup the project, go to the MP3 Manager Trac site and check out the sources from the SVN. Import all projects using Import > Existing projects into Workspace and launch the application from one of the launch files included in the branding plug-ins.
Eclipse Business Expenses Reporting Tool (EBERT)
EBERT (reference to any person living or dead is merely coincidental) is a simple travel expense tracking application written by Wayne Beaton. It has been “single-sourced”, so it can run as RCP application on the desktop, as RAP application on the web and as eRCP application on mobile devices. For this, it only utilizes the CDC-1.1/Foundation-1.1 execution environment (a subset of the Java SE 1.4 libraries). Apart from that, it uses OSGi Declarative Services to provide the data storage for the UI (data is stored using Java serialization). It has some master/detail views and utilizes Nebula components like the CDateTime widget.
To setup the project, download the Team Project Set rcp.psf from the EBERT project page and import it using File > Import > Team Project Set. This will check out the project from the Eclipse CVS. Start the product org.eclipse.examples.expenses.application.rcp/ebert.rcp.product to launch the application.
Address Book
The last example application is a little address book. This is what participants of my Eclipse RCP training courses (in German) build in the hands-on parts of the training. The simple variant shows the usage of basic RCP features whereas the eclipse edition uses non-RCP Eclipse components like Help and Forms and makes use of advanced features like JFace Data Binding.
To setup the project, download the source projects as archive from the project page (or clone them from github) and import them using Import > Existing projects into Workspace. Run com.example.addressbook/addressbook.product to launch the application.
P.S.
Do you know other Eclipse RCP applications that are well-written and structured and can serve as example for the Eclipse RCP platform? [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
Every year the Eclipse Foundation hands out awards at its annual EclipseCon conference. Nominations are now open for the next conference, to be held on March 22-25, 2010 in Santa Clara California. Anyone can submit a nomination, and you’re free to
... [More]
nominate your own projects, products, and applications if you like.
The categories for 2010 include:
Individual Awards: Top Committer, Top Contributor, Top Newcomer Evangelist
Eclipse Project Awards: Most Innovative New Feature or Eclipse Project, and Most Open Project
Technology Awards: Best Commercial Developer Tool, Best Open Source Developer Tool, Best EclipseRT Application, and Best RCP Application
The deadline for nominations is January 29, 2010. Good luck! [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
How should open source projects handle donations? And do it in a tasteful fashion?
I ask because I’ve been doing some work lately do expose the Friends of Eclipse program at Eclipse in a variety of ways. For example, I want to add a link
... [More]
on Eclipsepedia as we have on a variety of the Eclipse download pages.
I’m a fan of the Friends of Eclipse program because I believe in the power of community. All donations benefit the Eclipse community in some fashion from providing more bandwidth for users and committers to sponsoring Eclipse community events. The program is there as a way to contribute to Eclipse for people who may not have the time to become a committer but have the financial resources and desire to contribute. For awhile, I don’t think the program was very visible and that’s changed as the link has appeared on the download page. There are now over 1000 donations to the program! I see a future where we could get a considerable amount of support from the Friends of Eclipse program and help the Eclipse Foundation sponsor more events.
But is there a line that we can cross where it seems like we’re pan handling ?
I tried to look at how other projects handle donations.
If you look at Wikipedia, their approach is to have everything front and center.
It seems to work for Wikipedia as they tend to have a fund raising drive model. Their users don’t seem to mind either. The Linux Foundation has a way to donate on its web page and they also have a program similar to the Friends of Eclipse where you can sign up for individual membership with some benefits.
How do other people view donation in the open source context? Is there a line to cross?
How do other open source projects do this? [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
For extra-special goodness, and to get all you potential presenters off your collective keister, we have a little bonus going here. If you get your talk in today, 10 December 2009, before about 1800 Pacific Time, we, the ever-hard-working EclipseCon
... [More]
Program Committee, have the opportunity to pick 5 Talks of Awesomeness and Timeliness from the current tally of submissions.
These talks will receive some universally coveted Eclipse schwag in recognition of their their awesomeness and their timeliness. The PC will be up all hours over the weekend haggling over the winners with the intention to announce on 14th December. There are no lobbying guidelines in place!
There’s news on the keynotes too – check the conference page – what can I say here, except if you like Programming, Space or Robots, we are catering to you.
Posted in conferences, eclipse, open source [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
As we said here in France Mieux vaut tard que jamais. I spent the last few days (almost 1.5 year after the first P2 release) playing with P2 and the new PDE Build facilities on top of it.
It was longer than expected (I mean here longer
... [More]
than what I expected) to catch the main concepts of P2 but I think I finally get these concepts !!! And I’m happy with that !!!
In order to help other not already aware with P2 and the PDE Build facilities on top of it I am just gathering here all the links you need to get started:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Equinox/p2/Adding_Self-Update_to_an_RCP_Application
http://aniefer.blogspot.com/2009/03/building-p2-rcp-products-in-eclipse.html
http://www.toedter.com/blog/?p=79
http://help.eclipse.org/galileo/index.jsp?nav=/4_2_2
http://help.eclipse.org/galileo/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.platform.doc.isv/guide/p2_overview.htm
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Category:Equinox_p2
All required information to catch P2 and PDE build for it are available using these 6 links !!!!
Good luck and hope this can help a little others to get started quicker than me ;o)
PS: I started this blog entry for ME to avoid looking through Google over and over to find the information
[Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
On December 14, 2009, the Eclipse Foundation is hosting a webinar that will include speakers from Cisco, Morgan Stanley and eBay discussing deploying Eclipse to thousands, and even tens of thousands, of their developers.
Here’s the
... [More]
breakdown of the schedule…
Dennis Vaughn, Cisco
Scalability (65k + source files)
Diverse Deployments (geographically, NFS, OS/Versions)
Engineering Environment Diversity (legacy tools, acquisitions)
Working Culture (curmudgeons versus new hires, ROI versus VI/Emacs)
Miles Daffin, Morgan Stanley
Enterprise Constraints and their Consequences for Eclipse Provisioning
Next Steps: Further Reduce Total Cost of Ownership and Provide more Useful Features as Needed
Joep Rottinghuis, eBay
Scalability (100k + source files)
Deployment (individualized workspaces)
Usage Tracking (who is using what, and what issues are in what versions)
Manifest Maintenance (OSGi bundle/package versions)
Please register via email if you’re interested. [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Martin Lippert)
I organized a number of demo camps over the past years (always together with my colleague and friend Peter Friese), but the last one was different. I was overwhelmed by the huge number of registered attendees for the 2nd Eclipse Demo Camp in Hamburg
... [More]
this year. We had over 110 people registered on the wiki - around twice as much as for the other camps in the past. And nearly all of them showed up at the event. This was absolutely amazing! Thanks again to all of you making this event such a big success!!!
Peter posted some notes on the program and what happened during the demo camp, so I don't repeat all this and instead direct you to his nice summary of the event. And I have to say many many thanks to all the wonderful speakers who all gave funny and entertaining talks and made the evening not just full-packed with information and details on Eclipse stuff, but also a fun event. I enjoyed it very very much!
Looking forward to organizing the next demo camps and hoping to see you all there!!! [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Maarten Meijer)
Yesterday TSI International hosted the Eclipse Democamp for about 40 people in Nieuwegein.
Photographic impression
Wim Jongman preparing for the kick off on Eclipse 4.0
Advanced networking facilities
All the chairs in the building set
... [More]
up
Making clear who paid for food and drink
and quite crowd came to listen and watch
Jeroen van Grondelle and Marcel Offermans about OSGI service patterns. (Only implemented in full in Apache Felix), Jeroen stressed that we have to rethink our application for OSGi to fully take advantage of its facilities and not continue in our old Eclipse habits. Think service, not listener.
Jim van Dijk on Presentation Modelling Framework. We have to learn to think about UI in a whole different way again, not in terms of implementation (widgets, controls, HTML, ...) but in their abstractions: conversations, dialogs, compound dialogs, etc.
Break for food and drink, THANK YOU Wim Jongman!
That went down just as well as the presentations
Roel Spilker and Reinier Zwitserloot talked about Project Lombok and showed the Lombox Eclipse plugin to the world for the first time!
Wim Jongman and Marcel Offermans talked about and demonstrated OSGi in the cloud using Eclipse and Apache ACE.
Finally we heard and saw Jelle Herold about Verostko graphics toolkit & Statebox process engine.
ConclusionA well hosted gathering with excellent presentations for a growing number of Eclipse enthusiasts. [Less]
Posted
1 day
ago
by
nor...@blogger.com (Maarten Meijer)
Reinforcing your brand with every UI contact of your plugin is important in this competitive world. Many plugins launch Jobs when when Eclipse is starting up, to refresh their data, check the license, or whatever. Some Jobs display an icon to reveal
... [More]
the identity and reinforce the brand. Below is an example, showing two jobs that use text only and one with an icon.So how is this achieved?step 1: register with Workbench ProgressServiceAn Eclipse Job can belong to a family, where a family can be any java Object. The ProgressService maintains a table of icons associated with each family. So step one is to register your icon and family in your Activator's start() method.
@Override
public void start(final BundleContext context) throws Exception {
super.start(context);
getWorkbench().getProgressService().
registerIconForFamily(
getImageDescriptor(ICONPATH),
MyTools.PLUGIN_ID);
[...]
Rebuilder rebuilder = new Rebuilder("Initializing My Tools");
rebuilder.schedule(20L);
}step 2: override belongsTo() in your Job subclassNext you override the method belongsTo() in your subclass with some simpel logic, calling super.belongsTo()when not equal top allow for Job class hierarchies.public class Rebuilder extends Job {
[...]
@Override
public boolean belongsTo(final Object family) {
if (family.equals(MyTools.PLUGIN_ID)) {
return true;
}
return super.belongsTo(family);
}
[...]
}ConclusionAs always in Eclipse programming this solution took a long time to find, but can be implemented in a few lines of code once you know how.CaveatWhat remains is that you can only do this for Jobs that you launch yourself, and not for other background tasks like the Auto Build jobs that call your Builders.
They all share the same icon :-(
I have created a bug for this, please support and vote here. [Less]
