[ide-dev] [Crazy Idea] Humble Eclipse Bundle

[Cédric Brun <cedric.brun@xxxxxxx>]

Here is a crazy proposal to get funding, and it's Friday so I though, 
why not ?

This is based on the fact that we see quite lot of IDE users - at least 
Java IDE users - which are willing to pay and buy an IDE several dozens 
or hundred of bucks.

Which brings me to : what about a "humble Eclipse bundle" initiative ? 
Users pay about 20/30$ for :
- the ability to weight on one of predefined choices to express your 
priority: eg : Maven Integration, Editors shortcuts, UI responsiveness, 
startup time, cross-langages support... You pay, you have a click.
- a custom IDE with more suitable default settings when possible
- a custom branding, I want a splash screen which screams to my 
co-workers : I'm part of the 1% , I support Eclipse long-term and I'm 
willing to put money to achieve that.
- an 3.8 Platform based bundle - (I guess this one will be 
controversial) - but right now I feel that could be the best way to 
boostrap such an initiative, users really asked for 3.8 bundles when we 
released Juno. I have no idea of the Java stack, JDT, eGit and M2Eclipse 
for instance are still working - in their more recent builds - on top of 
3.8 though.

The web page has to be very clear : the funding is going to commiters to 
work upstream :  on the 4.x platform, on the JDT , on M2Eclipse and so 
on, the working group has the ability to target the fund taking in 
account the request of the paying users. This has to be 100% EPL 
licensed code hosted at the Eclipse Foundation and following the Eclipse 
Development Process.

"Humble Bundle" means we could organize things like that regularly for 
with one being Java, another one C++, HTML/JS, Ruby, JEE or whatever. I 
would start with an equivalent of the Java Package because that's a huge 
user base and that's a community which we can reach pretty easily IMO.

What do we need to start such an initiative ?
- building such a bundle
- building the website
- an easy to setup payment system, I heard a wordpress + paypal plugin 
can go a long way.
- communication

Do we need the Eclipse Foundation  ? Or even the working group ? 
Technically no, any company or group of people could do this on his own, 
but I bet it won't have the same impact and visibility and using the EF 
infrastructure for this would of course make things easier.

Figures  ? The Eclipse IDE for Java Developpers got downloaded more than 
1 million times for Juno, same for Indigo. If this doesn't work for 
Java, it probably won't work for any other market target.

Would that work ? We can't really know without trying. But this has 
benefits: funding which does not depend on big entities and which might 
be faster to cash and last but not least an extra involvement of end users.

A crazy idea ? Legally speaking I guess we need some kind of "company 
like" entity which can cash the money and pay committer's work but 
IANAL. I'm pretty sure the EF can't do that because of its charter. 
Another pain point would be : can commiters, in their name, get paid for 
this work ?

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