The Aperi community hosted a pedestal at this year's EclipseWorld conference recently in Boston, which was our first public event since the Eclipse Foundation announced the acceptance of our project. The event allowed us to demonstrate live working code, as well as a Powerpoint presentation featuring Aperi's mission, scope, benefits, architecture, and some embedded flash files of key functions from the actual code.
As you might expect at an Eclipse conference, the most popular booths were those from companies with a hand in major aspects of some of Eclipse's traditional application development projects. In fact, our observation was that most of the attendees were software developers, and at least half of them were interested in using Eclipse technology for general application development with the other half wishing to extend or leverage the Eclipse development framework.
Most of the attendees on the first day were curious to know what this new Aperi project was about. While they were familiar with Eclipse's application development framework, they were intrigued by a new project for storage administration. During the course of the two-day event, we handed out quite a few of the Aperi trifolds the community had recently created and educated attendees on the importance of the SMI-S standard and how Aperi was committed to implementing it. Since this was an open source event, most attendees were already well aware of how open source projects made overwhelming use of industry standards.
Mike Milinkovich, the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, was the keynote speaker and emphasized that the dynamic growth of the Eclipse community was a result of the community's vibrant ecosystem. The Eclipse community and ecosystem it has spawned, he claimed, continues to gain considerable momentum as a result of its members being driven by the concept of separating the development efforts of the "stuff that matters" from the "stuff that doesn't matter". That is, the entire community stood to benefit by collaborating on the technology that was essential but that didn't provide much differentiation across competing vendors. To see natural competitors showing an eagerness to collaborate with each other through the community is what he called the secret ingredient to Eclipse's success. It was clear in his view that since the entire community works to maintain the lower-level, commodity technology, all vendors can focus their efforts on delivering the higher-value capabilities they otherwise wouldn't be able to afford. The result is that vendors have created (and continue to create) their own niches that target the segments of the market they want to pursue. Naturally, end users have seen increasing benefits as the community brings to market innovative plug-ins that make use of the open source frameworks being enhanced by the entire community. This type of collaboration has become a hallmark of the Eclipse open source community and is the reason the Aperi community is so excited to be part of this dynamic environment.
Allen
