In this keynote, John Swainson talks about the events that led to IBM’s 2001 decision to sponsor the creation of Eclipse and the donation of the people, code, and intellectual property that started Eclipse on its incredible trajectory. At the time, John was the general manager of the Application Integration and Middleware Group at IBM. The creation of Eclipse was historic for a number of reasons, since it marked the first time that a major IT vendor donated a strategic piece of technology, unencumbered, with the intention of making it an industry standard via an open-source organization. Ten years later it may seem obvious that this was a good decision, but at the time it was full of risk.
Video Producer: EclipseCon Europe 2011