Thursday, March 27, 2025 - 07:00

Committer Profile: Naci Dai

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At a Glance:

What’s your background with open source? How did you first get involved with it?

I’m slightly showing my age here, but I went to school in the 80s, and when I graduated, open source was still in its Wild West Age. The internet was going mainstream, and the focus on open source really wasn’t on how companies could collaborate. 

I first got interested in it for very pragmatic reasons. When I founded ETERATION, we were a company of three people, and we were trying to build things we simply didn’t have the manpower to build from scratch. So, we started looking at open source tools and if there was anything we could improve and iterate on. 

One of the first projects we worked on was the open source Lomboz project, which was a tool for web application development. We made it open source on sourceforge, and it ended up becoming so popular and used worldwide that we were invited by IBM to attend a meeting in LA, a precursor to EclipseCon, that ended up being the birthplace of the Eclipse Web Tools. 

So, you’ve been involved with the Eclipse Foundation since its inception?

Exactly. That meeting created the Web Tools project, which is where we contributed our code. The Eclipse Web Tools Platform Project (WTP), as it came to be known, was the top download in the Eclipse Foundation for a long time.

This ended up being a fantastic learning experience, both for us as a company and for me as a person. We modelled much of our open source business based on the lessons we learned from the project, and learned how to make use of the large and open network that we’d helped create. At the time, we were a three-person company sitting at the same table with billion-dollar companies, and they were listening to us. It was proof positive that the Eclipse model of collaboration could work. 

How did that lead to your greater involvement with the Eclipse Foundation?

The reality is that trying to break into established markets against large players is hard. But the credibility you can establish through an open source foundation with a well-established and defined process is invaluable. In our case, after we contributed to the WTP project, it opened the doors for us to provide services for some major players, such as IBM, BEA Systems, and to others outside the foundation. 

Fast forward 15 years and as a business we’ve moved from the web tools space to new things including automotive and robotics. As we did with everything, we were looking to see how open source could help us, and through this process we ended up talking to some people in the automotive space. We heard about all the software problems they were dealing with, and we figured we had something that could potentially help. When we heard that the Eclipse Foundation was in the process of setting up the Software Defined Vehicle Working Group, we knew we had an opportunity to contribute and help overcome some of the software challenges.  

We became one of the original founding members of the Eclipse Software Defined Vehicle Working Group, and I’m involved with several SDV-related projects, including Eclipse Muto and the Eclipse SDV Blueprints project. 

What have been some of the most rewarding aspects of working in open source for you? 

When you’re contributing to a project at a technical level, there’s a lot of interaction in terms of the finer elements of code or the functionality you’re trying to provide. But in the SDV Working Group particularly, there’s also been a lot of interaction that isn’t as software focused. 

Part of the efforts to build the community and develop solutions in this space is hosting regular community events and hackathons. These have been a great opportunity to bring together people from all sorts of companies in the working group to collaborate, innovate, and discuss. 

And people are talking more than just code. You hear from people about the problems they’re facing and learn about the requirements they have, and often enough from people who aren’t even familiar with how to use and take part in open source. It’s really an incredible opportunity. You’d never get all these people in the same room otherwise.

Is there anything you’re particularly excited about right now?

We have a project called Eclipse SDV Blueprints, which is a great microcosm of the power of innovation you can get in open source. It’s all about bringing together people who have particular challenges in the SDV space with all the technologies that could be used to solve those challenges, which we call Blueprints. 

We need new ideas and contributions from the industry to make the technological playground needed to develop de-facto standards and common platforms we’d like to see. This is an especially free-form and very open area without a lot of processes involved. Many of the challenges that have already been posed in the Blueprints space have been used for our hackathons, and our last one produced solutions that ended up in an SDV project itself, which was fantastic. 

We’d love to take these events to the next level this year and do hybrid events so the global community can easily participate, rather than only those who can physically attend.  

Any advice for someone considering getting more involved with the Eclipse Foundation or open source?

It can be very intimidating to approach an open source project, particularly one that’s large, well-established, or has some big industry players in it already. 

But there are so many ways to get involved and be part of the discussion. We have interest groups online, and joining one of those and participating in discussions around the technology is one step. The next would be joining an event. We have many in-person and online events, and attending one and meeting people is a great next step. From here, you can start listening in on the activity of an open source community you find interesting, since open source is completely, well, open. Try to suggest things the project may require, or point out problems to fix, or use it and report any bugs. These are all contributions, and we greatly value them. 

If you really find your take on this, it’s very easy to simply contribute code, become better known in the community, and ultimately become part of the community. The process is very flexible. And the open source community is very open and transparent. There are a lot of strong opinions, but not personal criticism. Everything is focused on transparency and meritocracy. We just want the best code we can get in an open and fair process.

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