At the Vienna DemoCamp it once more became apparent how important e4 is going to be to not loose the whole “Eclipse RCP” market segement. I already blogged some time ago about the problems I have to justify spending workhours on e4.

After the Vienna DemoCamp I reread my blog and restarted a discussion in my own company how I could spend work time on it. The problem is that my company is quite small and it is impossible to let me work on e4 without gaining any money but my two collegues (we are 3 people owning the company + 4 employees) made the offer that for every payed work hours I could allocate for e4-development work we’ll add 50% as our investment which means for every hour I could get sponsorship I could work 1.5 hours on e4 in my worktime.

Now I don’t know how likely it is that I could find sponsors for at least an hour but I want to blog about this possibility because say I manage (because of what ever reason) to get payed for 2 days I could spend 3.

The questions are:

• Why you should at least spend one penny/cent/… for e4 and/or the core platform so I repeat it once more:
  
  If you care about Eclipse Technologies in RCP-Space you might get in touch with e4 (contribute, make someone contribute on behalf of you, …) and make it as powerful as possible else you’ll be outperformed by other platforms even in the short term.
  
  Naturally this is my personal opinion but I worked with some of the competitors in the last weeks and though they are not there yet they’ll be in 1.5 years when e4 1.1 is going to be released. So if some feature you desperately need is not in e4 1.0 you are in trouble because you won’t get it until August 2011.
• Why should you spend the money on me?
  • You get 50% more than you pay – not a too bad deal, right?
  • I’m a committer already, I know the code base, I know the dev team and they know me. So I could be productive starting from day 1

I would have told this above at the DemoCamp in Hamburg but because of bad wheather conditions in Austria I’m not able to make it there. So while this is probably not the ideal forum with the lack of others I wrote this blog.