Bjorn Freeman-Benson

Revisiting my "Not A Product" column with a new proposal. (Again, for the record, these are my personal opinions and not endorsed, approved, or even reviewed by the Foundation.)While I'm sure that my proposal for the Foundation not to distribute binary builds for users is the best solution, it generated quite a hostile reaction from some people so perhaps an intermediate step is the best compromise.Recall that the twin goals of my binary distribution proposal were (1) to educate the users that Eclipse is not a product and that if they want a product, they should get one from a member company and (2) to send more eyeballs to the members to provide more membership value. So if you all1 don't like sending users to the members for distros, today's proposal is bringing the members to the user distros. Specifically, advertising of the member companies in the binary distros that the Foundation hosts.Firefox already does this:So how might this look in Eclipse. Perhaps a new splash page listing all the Strategic members:And a revised help menu explaining to the user where to get support:Of course, a good UX person and graphic designer would do better than I have - the key point is that the binary distros from the Foundation would push users to members.Obviously, most of the readers of this blog are programmers and could easily figure out how to defeat these adverts, but you are not the audience: these member advertisements are aimed at the vast number of pure-users who just download the free Eclipse. Similarly obviously, companies that build products on top of Eclipse would continue to do their own binary product builds and would not include these advertising plug-ins.Win-win.Before you comment on this column, be sure to have read "It's A New World" and understand that "I want things to be just as they are" is not an option. Also, you might want to read "Soul-searching for papers, Web 2.0, open source" by Matt Asay because Eclipse is not the only community facing these changes.1 When having a discussion via twitter or blogs, the "you all" is just the in-crowd. We're not getting the opinions of the larger pure-user community here. In fact, perhaps the pure-user community would be perfectly happy with my earlier proposal for binary distros - we'll never know.