In November 2001, IBM announced it was open sourcing the Eclipse Platform and, with seven other business partners, launching the Eclipse Consortium. In those early days community energy was very focussed on the twin goals of making Eclipse a great development platform and ensuring that Eclipse Consortium members enjoyed commercial success ? and rightly so. However, a small group within IBM, mainly at OTI and at IBM Research, began to think about outreach to the academic and research communities. The Eclipse leadership team understood that in the long run, Eclipse would only succeed if universities produced students by the hundreds and perhaps even thousands (in our wildest dreams!) who were familiar with Eclipse, knew how to use it and saw it as their first choice for tool development. A multi-year plan was conceived to, in effect, market Eclipse to the university community. Elements of that plan included Eclipse Fellowships, Ellipse Innovation Grants, the Eclipse Technology PMC and a workshop program that evolved into the ETX series. In retrospect it was arguably one of the most cost effective and influential community building efforts in the open source era. This talk presents one insider’s view of how it all happened and why it succeeded.

Dr. Brian Barry is currently Head of FD Labs (www.firstderivatives.com). Brian is Co-Founder and past CEO of Bedarra Research Labs, creators of the Ivy visual analytics workbench. Prior to that he held a number of executive positions at Object Technology International (OTI) including Chief Scientist and CTO. He became President of IBM OTI Labs after OTI’s acquisition by IBM and several years later succeeded Dave Thomas as CEO. Under their combined leadership, OTI developed the Eclipse Platform, J9 Java VM, IBM VisualAge for Java, and IBM VisualAge MicroEdition for embedded systems. Brian’s published research articles are numerous and varied, reflecting his interest in a broad spectrum of technical areas spanning simulation, OO applications, systems integration, embedded systems and software engineering. Brian is a co-author of the ANSI Smalltalk standard, and has been an active participant in research review boards and conference committees. He has a long history of involvement with open source software, and is a Founder of both the Eclipse Foundation (www.eclipse.org) and Open Health Tools (www.openhealthtools.org); he served as CTO for Open Health Tools from its inception until 2014. Brian holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from Queen’s University.