Tuesday, March 08, 2011

Don't forget to vote!

If you are an Eclipse committer, please take a few minutes of your scarce time to vote in the Eclipse Board elections. There are only three days left, voting ends on Friday March 11th at 3pm Eastern time!

If you are an individual (not employed by a member company) committer: Please click here, and sign and send the membership agreement to the Eclipse Foundation. This will enable you to vote in the upcoming board member elections. There is no cost, and as an added bonus, the Eclipse Foundation is now sending really nice thank-you e-mails to those individual committers who become members.

Why should you do that? Let me try to explain with a diagram:


(thanks, diagrammr!)

Here is the same information in text form, copied from the election process web page:
  • Each Committer Member gets one vote. Note that committers who are employees of Member companies have all the rights and privileges (including voting) of a Committer Member.
  • Individual committers must join the Eclipse Foundation as Committer Members by signing the Membership Agreement in order to be allowed to vote.
  • All committers who are employees of a single company have their votes collapsed into a single vote in the committer elections.
That's right: every vote from an individual committer member (someone who signed the individual membership agreement) is worth exactly the same as the votes from all EclipseSource committers combined, or all Oracle committers combined, or all itemis committers combined, ... you get the idea.

That seems a little bit weird, but it sort of makes sense considering the situation back when the rules were made: IBM had way more Eclipse committers than everybody else, and there was a risk that they would determine the committer representatives, who then could be seen as voting in favour of IBM - leading to an imbalance at the board of directors. So when you think about it, the rules ensure that the committer representatives election is truly independent of any potential company interests.

So, to repeat, if you are an individual (not employed by a member company) committer: Please click here, and sign and send the membership agreement to the Eclipse Foundation. It's free (of charge), it will enable you to vote in the upcoming board member elections, and as an added bonus, the Eclipse Foundation is now sending really nice thank-you e-mails to those individual committers who become members.

More votes mean more weight for the committer representatives on the Eclipse Board of Directors. And if you are an individual committer, your vote weighs a lot.

Thank you!