On Time and On Budget

As you may know I live on the Canadian west coast (In Victoria British Columbia). We are 3 hours behind Easter Time, which means that the Eclipse release was supposed to happen at 6:00am for me.

I awoke this morning to find this in my inbox:

I would like to challenge you to find another piece of software that has consistently delivered On-Time since 2001.

I would also like to point out that this is no accident.  Eclipse ships because there are very dedicated people working tirelessly behind the scene.  While there is no way I can enumerate all of them, a few special thank-yous are in order. Of course all the committers, project leads, PMC, and council members deserve big thank-you.  There would be nothing to ship without you.  But for a release to ship with such consistency, you need rock solid release plan and outstanding release engineers.  I don’t know all the release engineers personally, but certainly Kim Moir and Nick Boldt have been doing an awesome job for their respective projects.  Markus Knauer gets the shout-out for the great job he does assembling the Eclipse Packages.

Of course, Denis Roy and the entire Eclipse webmaster team deserve the credit for managing the infrastructure behind all of this. I imagine that most software projects would use an excuse like ‘our hardware is on fire’ to delay the release – not at Eclipse, because remember, ship happens.

But the biggest thank-you goes out to David Williams, whose leadership, (nagging :)), and vision has made this entire process possible. Thank-you!