Mike,
Re: "Who is responsible at Eclipse.org for the "big picture"? The team that is ensuring that the Eclipse SDK + WTP + TPTP (+ all the other pieces that are required) really is a credible competitor for NetBeans or IDEA or whatever else is a threat to some parts (or all) of our community?" That is a good question indeed, but one easily answered: no one is responsible. And to be clear, it is explicitly not the role of the staff of the Eclipse Foundation to take that role. We kinda kick things along a little bit, but the technical leadership must come from the projects. We do not have the skills or the resources within the EMO to even attempt this, assuming we had the mandate to do so. Which we do not. The even harder question is: should there be? My impression is that there was an assumption early in the creation of the Foundation that the Architecture Council would fulfill this role[1]. But that obviously hasn't worked out. Institutionally, it is well positioned, but that would assume that its members actually invested time and energy into making it so. And it also assumes that the ".Eclipse SDK + WTP + TPTP.(etc.)" projects actually wanted to listen to and act upon guidance from outside their projects, which historically has not been the case. In my observation, leadership in open source communities occurs when people decide that they are going to step up and be leaders. If enough people take on the mantle of community leadership and work to change the status quo, it will happen. If not the answer to my question above is: apparently not. There is an additional perspective as well, which is that the Eclipse open source projects should not be focused on the competitors you've listed. (Personally, I think of Visual Studio as the competitor, but that's just one opinion.) The fact is that those are products, not community-led open source projects. If you want to compare apples to apples, you should be looking to Rational, JBuilder, MyEclipse, etc. etc. when doing those analyses. But then, again, if our basic platform is not good enough to attract widespread adoption, the ecosystem suffers if the platform loses market share. This is a complex issue. But one which many of the readers of this list can impact if they choose to do so. In the absence of any larger change, I suggest you keep doing what you're doing. Which is work to creating a community-led project to build our next-generation Eclipse platform. It's not like that is in any way a modest goal! [1] This is not to say that the AC is the only possible solution. It's just the current one. But creating new organizational bodies doesn't particularly impress me as a solution either.
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