In one of my last posts I claimed for a forge for Eclipse-related projects, which in my opinion could help developers share their ideas and gain community. Furthermore, some of these projects could end up being part of Eclipse, that is, becoming an official Eclipse project.
This week, I’ve read that the Eclipse Foundation and Google has set up Eclipse Labs, a forge for Eclipse related projects backed by Google Code. Thanks to every one involved in making this possible.
Personally, I think this will spread the use of Eclipse and it can be a central repository where sharing new ideas. Even more interesting: it seems that there will be an Eclipse Labs API, that, among other things, will make possible for the Eclipse Marketplace to discover projects hosted at Eclipse Labs.
Having a look at it, one thing I miss is some listing of projects in the front page. You have to click on one of the tags or type your search. For instance, I’d like to have a listing of projects ordered by activity.
Eclipse Labs doesn’t impose IP restrictions, and you are given a set of licenses from which you have to choose one for your projects (these are EPL compatible licenses, remeber that GPL is discouraged). Projects hosted at Eclipse Labs are not official Eclipse projects, so «org.eclipse» namespaces should be avoided. One thing to take into account: you have to choose between hosting your code in svn or Mercurial… so some of us who had started to think of git as the svn replacement will have to re-evaluate our choice.
By the way, Wascana is already hosted at Eclipse Labs, so what are you waiting for? As Doug Schaefer says, I’m impatient to see what people do with Eclipse.
CodeUrjc 