Shooting for the moon

The simultaneous release has been a huge success at Eclipse. Over the years, the June release has come to signify THE release date for the majority of the major Eclipse projects. This years Galileo will be the fourth Eclipse simultaneous release following Callisto, Europa, and Ganymede.

Right from the start, the name of the simultaneous release has been critical. It has become a brand in itself and has a huge following in all areas of our Eclipse community, from marketing to media to development.

We chose Galilean moons for the early releases. Io was due up to be the name of the fourth release, but given that "Io" looks a lot like the number "10" and "I/O", we went with the name of the astronomer who discovered these four moons.

Now that we are out of Galilean moons, the Eclipse planning council have finalized a formula for our releases going forward.

We have agreed to keep our tradition of using a moon within our solar system. We have also recognized it would be desirable to maintain an alphabetical order going forward, so that we recognize the "N" simultaneous release follows the "M" release.

This means that our next Eclipse simultaneous release in 2010 will be a moon starting with the letter "H". Oliver Cole has setup a doodle vote and give our community a limited set of "H" moons to vote on. We can also comment further on Bugzilla 271054.

We now have a strategy going forward to name the next nineteen Eclipse simultaneous releases.

Definitely shooting for the moon.