OStatic

As we posted yesterday, the EclipseCon conference is coming up next week. It will feature many open source movers and shakers, including Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. Mike previously held executive positions at Oracle, IBM and WebGain. Under his watch, the Eclipse Foundation has grown to over 185 corporate members worldwide, over 90 open source projects, and over 1,000 Eclipse committers. In advance of the conference, we checked in with Mike on what will be discussed there, and what he sees ahead for open source.

Next week, March 23rd to 26th, EclipseCon takes place in Santa Clara, California. Eclipse is a very large open source community focused on open develpment platforms, and extensible frameworks and tools, overseen by The Eclipse Foundation. The conference is an annual event, and this year's will feature a number of high-profile speakers, including developers and software leads from Microsoft, IBM and other companies and organizations. The first 30 OStatic readers who register for the conference can get a $300 discount (normally $1,795 if bought in advance) by entering the following code upon registration: OSTATECON09. Here's more about what to expect at EclipseCon.

The Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) is coming up, to be held March 24th and 25th at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The conference will include much discussion on the future of open source. In preparation, OStatic has been? running a series of guest posts on this theme, featuring thought leaders from top open source projects. We checked in with Dries Buytaert, founder of the Drupal content management system, and co-founder of Acquia. Martin Schneider, director of product marketing for SugarCRM, weighed in on the open cloud, and Novell VP Justin Steinman wrote about open source and mass customization. Brian Gentile, CEO of Jaspersoft, also discussed the consumerization of information. In this latest installment in the series, we have a guest post on the future of open source from Erik Troan, founder and CTO of rPath, which offers a platform for software vendors to create and maintain software appliances and virtual appliances in multiple virtual machine formats.

Early this morning, the Eclipse Foundation announced the Pulsar Initiative, a joint effort to create an open, standard mobile application development platform. The Pulsar Initiative is led by the mobile device manufacturers Motorola, Nokia and Genuitec, while industry leaders such as IBM, RIM, and Sony Ericsson Mobile are among the participating members.

The Pulsar Initiative's first goal is to define a common set of Eclipse-based tools in a packaged distribution, allowing developers to create mobile applications for multiple devices using a single, familiar development environment. This saves developer's time (and sanity) by bringing applications to more devices without needing to be intimately familiar with every handset's software development kit.