Open Source Software = Predictable Software

The stereotypical image of an open source project is a bunch of hackers working in dark rooms, scratching their itches and releasing software “when it is ready.” Of course, this is far from reality for many of the mainstream, mature open source communities like Linux, Mozilla, Eclipse and others. These open source communities have very mature and sophisticated release processes that deliver new updates in a very predictable manner and are the envy of the software industry, including commercial software vendors.

In the Eclipse community we are very proud of our annual release trains – a great example of predictable open source software. For the last 8 years, Eclipse has shipped a release at the end of June; this past year, our release included 62 different project teams and over 400 developers from 50 different organizations. According to Ohloh, this represented 46 million lines of code, over $700 million R&D investment, all released on the same day, at the same time! And since we have done it for the last eight years, our community has come to expect it and plan for it...