UPDATED: Ward Cunningham, the "Father of the Wiki," is joining the Eclipse Foundation, the organization's chief announced Monday.

He leaves Microsoft's patterns and practices group, where he served as an architect. The group provides developers with guides, code samples and reference implementations to design, develop and deploy Microsoft applications.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company has not yet announced a replacement for Cunningham.

"We are thankful to Ward for his contributions and wish him the best of luck in his future," the spokesperson said.

Cunningham is credited with founding the first wiki (define) site in 1995 and co-authored the book, The Wiki Way, in 2001. His work in the area led to the extremely popular online database collaboration phenomenon that's embodied in works such as Wikipedia.

He was also one of the co-developers of the popular software development methodology that was later coined Extreme Programming (XP) (define), an approach that attempts to simplify and expedite the development process.

A committer is an Eclipse member who has write access to the Concurrent Versions System (define) repository for one of the many software projects under way at the organization, the download page or the Web site.

Milinkovich stated that Cunningham's expertise in software development, as well as his interest in open source will help the organization better support its committer community.

The Eclipse Foundation's support for its committers, Milinkovich said, should be more than just providing the infrastructure and common processes for its project committers.

"A high functioning committer community is about collaboration and cooperation between the project silos," he wrote. "Ward will lead the effort to create a more cohesive Eclipse committer community by working with developers in order to enhance Eclipse as 'the place to be.'"


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