Congratulations David!

Each year, the Eclipse Foundation recognizes key contributors and committers amongst its community with awards. This year we created a new Lifetime Contribution Award to recognize an individual who has a long, sustained record of contribution to Eclipse as a whole. That is, all three communities of Eclipse: adopters, users, and committers. The award is chosen by the Eclipse Foundation Staff, and in our view is a recognition of the community member we feel has long made valuable contributions to the success of Eclipse. And we don’t mean technical contributions to projects, no matter how brilliant. We mean contributions which have impacted the success of the community.

The winner of the first ever Eclipse Foundation Lifetime Contribution Award is David Williams of IBM.

David Williams Accepting His Eclipse Lifetime Contribution Award

David has been a member of Eclipse since 2004, is a committer on 10 Eclipse Projects, Project Lead of 3, an active member of the Tools PMC, PMC Leader of the Web Tools Platform Project, and current chair of the Eclipse Planning Council. Above and beyond all that, though, David has helped all of Eclipse by leading many of the yearly Simultaneous Release trains: starting with the very first one, Callisto, setting in motion the vision and basic mechanisms that are still in place. While not the official lead of Europa or Ganymede David was still central to getting them done, on time. Finally, becoming Planning Council Chair during Galileo, he lead it to completion, then Helios, and now Indigo. David has successfully balanced being both mentor and task-master to keep everyone on track, meeting the requirements to form a common software site repository at Eclipse, which in turn is an enormous benefit to all three communities of Eclipse: adopters, users, and committers.

David is without a doubt one of the most highly regarded members of the Eclipse community. He is a tireless worker with a key focus on doing the right thing for the projects. His dedication is remarkable and I was pleased to see his recognition with the Lifetime Contribution Award this year.

I would like to thank IBM for supporting David’s continuing contributions to the future success of Eclipse.

Please join me in congratulating David!