I have an announcement. Today is my last day at QNX Software Systems. Now, for the Eclipse CDT community, no worries. I won’t be going far and you won’t see much of a change from me. But I do prefer to hold off announcing where I’ll end up until I get there. Today, I want to pay tribute to QNX for whom we owe so much for where the CDT is today.

I’ll always remember the first CDT summit in 2002. It was held here in one of the larger meeting rooms. We had people from Red Hat, MontaVista, Rational, and of course QNX. I remember the QNX gang being giddy as if they were proud parents. It was that day that the CDT project was born (or more historically accurate, reborn, but anyway).

The CDT that QNX gave to us was exactly what I was looking for. Something that fit in well with the rest of the Eclipse plug-ins, and the JDT especially. Even then we considered mixed language development with JNI as the holy grail that we were seeking, which we still are seeking BTW. The whole thing was a tribute to the small band of great developers that were locked away in an offsite building charged with coming up with an Eclipse based IDE in 6 months. They made all the right choices and most of them are still in effect today.

QNX also had the vision of what a commercial open source co-operative could accomplish in the right environment. IDE’s are not QNX’s core competency, and that is true for most platform and tool vendors. Very few IDE’s have been successful in the market because they require a huge amount of investment to do right. But if we all banded together, put away our competitive anxieties, and focused on the common good, we could and did pull it off.

I also have to thank QNX for giving me the opportunity to “finish” what I started at IBM/Rational. When we lost the group there, we lost a hand full of really good developers, and friends, that were working on the CDT. But we clearly did not have a “successful” indexing strategy at that point and I really feared for the future of the CDT. I sincerely have to thank the management team here for talking me into coming over. It gave me the opportunity to set things right, and they helped me build my career as a leader in the Eclipse community.

I’m very happy with how the CDT and its community have evolved over the last two years. We owe a lot to QNX and QNX will always hold a special place in our community. I wish all the people I’ve worked here all the best and I look forward to continue working with them in the spirit of friendly co-opetition.