Pre-emptive snarky comment

It appears I am not the only one reading the "Old New Thing" blog from a Microsoft employee who sometimes ends his posts with pre-emptive snarky comments, like for example:

• "That's about all Microsoft is good for: making a song out of their critical stop and error tones."
• "This is why Microsoft products suck."
• "Oh, right, just like the advertisements for Windows Vista, which said that The Wow Starts Now. I didn't feel any Wow."

I enjoy reading that blog, and not for the snarky comments. I find it interesting to read from someone who is working in a similar position but different context: there seem to be striking parallels with similar experiences we have made on the Eclipse Platform team.

Anyway, it is time to make a pre-emptive snarky comment myself. It is not actually related to this blog entry. It is related to an e-mail announcing the creation of a new component e4 in the Eclipse Incubator project:

"Just as I expected from those guys at IBM. We'll never see diversity in the Platform."

Now that this is out of the way, here is the scoop: We want to make the code for our EclipseCon demos available in the open. We realized (admittedly, very late) that nobody from the SWT team had commit rights in the existing Eclipse Incubator project. Creating a new component in the Eclipse Incubator project was the fastest way to create a home for the experimental code that we will be demoing, with write access to everybody who has been involved so far.

The key words are "so far" - our hope is to find more people and companies who would like to work with us on e4 - our current name for the next-generation platform on which an Eclipse 4.0 can be built. To find out more about this, and to see the demos, come to these two talks at EclipseCon: Eclipse 4.0, and The Future of SWT.

By the way, when I wrote "we", I was referring to people at IBM, Innoopract, and Code 9. So far.