EclipseCon Day 2: Fakin' It

This morning we had the delightfully irrelevant and funny Dan Lyons aka Fake Steve Jobs give a keynote and make fun of pretty much every on in the room.
Besides making us laugh, I found it cool how his blog / job / book evolved over time and Dan adapted to the demands and wishes of his community.

Fake Steve Jobs was created as Dan was bored of covering large IT like IBM and Sun for Forbes magazine. He also had a fear stemming from the perceived attack on the traditional print media from the blogs. So he faced his fear and dove in to learn about blogs. The "fake" blog started as a learning experiment and spiraled from there.

I then attended a talk by Tim Wagner from Microsoft on open source versus commercial platform strategies. The abstract is here: link.
Tim, who used to be heavily involved with Eclipse via WTP did a high level overview of the similarities and differences between how the Eclipse platform is developed and how Microsoft Visual Studio is developed.
There were far fewer differences than you may think and Tim proposed that one key to Eclipse's success is how closely it emulates commercial software development.
I am not sure who is emulating who? Reliable shipping dates over 6 years with a strong development heartbeat driven by community iteration and feedback: I propose all commercial software could learn something from the Eclipse development process.

Once of my last duties as a board member was to spend some time at a Meet the Board Member table in the exhibit hall. Not really sure this idea worked...

The rest of the day was filled with Jazz. I plan to write separate blog entries for the Jazz talks I attended.

In the evening, I participated in Jazz Live! where some of the senior Jazz devs got the chance to demo and explain all the cool things we have been designing and building over the past years. If you missed it grab somebody with a "Talk to me about Jazz" button and ask for a demo of what they think is cool.