Eclipse Foundation

The Eclipse Foundation
Formation	February 2, 2004[1]
Purpose	The Eclipse Foundation's purpose is to advance open source projects and cultivate communities and business ecosystems.
Headquarters	Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Membership	275 members
Executive Director	Mike Milinkovich
Website	www.eclipse.org

The Eclipse Foundation is an independent, not-for-profit corporation that acts as a steward of the Eclipse open source software development community. It is an organization supported by over 275 members. The Foundation focuses on key services such as: intellectual property (IP) management, ecosystem development, development process, and IT infrastructure. Its members include industry leaders who have embraced open source as a key enabler for business strategy.^[2]

Created to allow a vendor-neutral, open, and transparent community to be established around the original Eclipse Project, the Foundation provides a global community of individuals and organizations with a mature, scaleable, and commercially focused environment for collaboration and innovation. Its stated aim is to cultivate both the community and "an ecosystem of complementary products and services.^[2]

The Eclipse Foundation is considered a "third generation" ^[3] open-source organization, and is home to Jakarta EE, and over 350 open source projects, including runtimes, tools, and frameworks for a wide range of technology domains such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Automotive, Geospatial, Systems Engineering, and many others. " The most well-known of the Eclipse projects is the Eclipse platform, a multi-language software development environment and IDE".^[2]

History

The Eclipse Project was originally created by IBM in November 2001 and was supported by a consortium of software vendors. The Eclipse Project continues to be used by millions of developers.^[2]

In 2004, the Eclipse Foundation was founded to lead and develop the Eclipse community.^[4] It was created to allow a vendor-neutral, open, and transparent community to be established around Eclipse.^[2]

Top Level Projects

As of June 2018, the Eclipse Foundation hosts a total of 358 open source projects.^[5]

There are 1,564 committers to Eclipse projects ^[6] and an estimated 162 million total Physical Source Lines of Code have been contributed to Eclipse project repositories as of September 2018.^[7]

Top Level Eclipse Projects

The Foundation utilizes a hierarchical project structure. Each project stems from a primary parent project and may include sub-projects. The uppermost projects, which do not have a parent project, are called Top Level Projects.^[8]

As of August 2018, the Eclipse Foundation Top Level projects are:

Eclipse Working Groups

The Eclipse Foundation is governed by a set of bylaws, agreements, and policies. One aspect of this governance is vendor-neutrality. A Vendor-neutral governance model is one which encourages industry collaborations, which are carried out using Working Groups.

Eclipse Working Groups are the collaboration of organizations that combine practices of open source development, with a set of services required for open innovation. They allow organizations to foster industry collaborations across organizational boundaries.^[9]

As of August 2018, the Eclipse Foundation hosts 10 Working Groups.

These include:

Capella IC

The Capella Industry Consortium is part of the PolarSys Working Group. It focuses on developing vendor-neutrality and open governance in the ecosystem around the Capella project. Capella is an open MBSE solution which offers methodological guidance, intuitive model editing, and viewing capabilities for Systems, Software, and Hardware Architects.

GEMOC RC

The GEMOC Research Consortium supports the international initiative to develop, coordinate, and disseminate Research & Transfer efforts on the use and globalization of modeling languages. The initiative develops techniques, frameworks, and environments to facilitate the creation, integration, and automated processing of heterogeneous modeling languages.

Internet of Things

The Eclipse IoT Working Group provides the open technology needed to build IoT devices, gateways and cloud platforms.

Jakarta EE

The Jakarta EE Working Group cultivates business interests related to the cloud native Java technologies.

LocationTech

The LocationTech Working Group focuses on open source geospatial technologies.

openMDM

The openMDM Working Group provides tools and systems, qualification kits and adapters for standardized and vendor independent management of measurement data in accordance with the ASAM ODS standard.

openPASS

The openPASS Working Group develops core frameworks and modules for the safety assessment of driving assistance and automated driving systems.

Papyrus IC

The Papyrus Industry Consortium is organized under the Polarsys Working Group. It provides resources to enhance the Papyrus projects for systems engineering.

Polarsys

The PolarSys Working Group creates, collaborates with, and supports Open Source tools for the development of embedded systems.

Science

The Eclipse Science Working Group is a collaboration of people developing software components used for basic scientific research.

Types of Membership

There are five types of membership to the Eclipse Foundation.^[10] These include:

Strategic Members

Strategic Members are organizations that invest developers and other resources to further develop the Eclipse technology. Each strategic member has a representative on the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors.

There are two types of strategic members. These types are Strategic Developers and Strategic Consumers.

Strategic Developers are major contributors of open source technology to Eclipse. Strategic developers lead Eclipse Foundation open source projects and have at least eight developers assigned full time to develop Eclipse technologies. These members also have representation on the Eclipse Planning and Architecture Councils.
Strategic Consumers are major users of Eclipse technology. Strategic Consumers have the option to contribute one or two developers to Eclipse projects.^[11]

Current Strategic Members

As of August 2018, there are 11 Strategic Members.^[12] These include (in alphabetical order):

CA Technologies
CEA LIST
Fujitsu Limited
IBM
OBEO
Oracle
Payara Services Limited
Red Hat, Inc.
Robert Bosch GmbH
SAP SE
Tomitribe Corporation

Enterprise Members

Enterprise Members are typically larger organizations that use Eclipse technology as a platform for their internal development projects and/or build products and services built on, or with, Eclipse.^[13]

Solutions Members

Solutions Members are organizations that participate in the development of the Eclipse ecosystem. These organizations offer products and services based on, or with, Eclipse.^[14]

As of August 2018, there are 151 Solutions members involved with the Eclipse Foundation.^[15]

Some examples of Solutions members are:

ADLINK Technology Inc.
AIRBUS
BMW Group
BREDEX GmbH
Canoo Engineering AG
Cirrus Link Solutions, LLC
Ericsson AB
Eurotech
GE Digital
Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.
Google Inc.
Huawei
Intel Corporation
Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America, Inc.
Mettenmeier GmbH
Microsoft Corp.
Nokia
OpenText Analytics
Samsung
Siemens AG
Toyota Motor Europe NV SA
TypeFox GmbH
Volkswagen Group of America, Inc.

Associate Members

Associate Members are non-voting members who can submit requirements, participate in project reviews and participate in the Annual Meeting of the Membership at Large. Associate members also participate in scheduled quarterly update meetings of the same.^[16]

As of August 2018, there are 121 Associate Members of the Eclipse Foundation.^[17]

Some examples of Associate Members are:

Caltech/Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Carleton University
Carnegie Mellon University, Software Industry Center
Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal
Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science, Warsaw University of Technology
Michigan State University Facility for Rare Isotope Beams
Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT)
Professional Science Master's in GIS, Temple University
Queen's University at Kingston
Schweizerische Bundesbahnen SBB (Swiss Federal Railways)
The University of York
University of Calgary
University of Manchester

Committer Members

Committer Members are committers who become full members of the Eclipse Foundation. Committers are the core developers of Eclipse projects and can commit changes to project source code. Committer Members have representation on the Board of Directors.

As of August 2018, there are 390 Committer Members of the Eclipse Foundation.

Funding

The Eclipse Foundation is a non-profit member-supported organization. The Foundation is funded largely from membership dues.

Strategic members contribute annual dues of 0.2% of their corporate revenues (minimum $25K, maximum $500K).
The annual membership fee for Enterprise Members is tiered based on revenue.
- There is one standard Enterprise membership fee for non-for-profit organizations, standards bodies, universities, research institutes, media and publishing, government and other organization types as defined by the Eclipse Foundation board of directors.
The annual membership fee for Solutions Members is tiered based on revenue.
- There is one standard Solutions membership fee for not-for-profit organizations, standards bodies, universities, research institutes, media and publishing, government and other organization types as defined by the Eclipse Foundation board of directors.
Associate membership is gratis for not-for-profit organizations, standards bodies, universities, research institutes, media and publishing, government and other organization types as defined by the Eclipse Foundation board of directors.
- There is one standard annual fee for all other organizations, including for-profits.

Events

The Eclipse Foundation hosts 3 main types of events: Conferences, Demo Camps, and Eclipse Days.

Conferences

Eclipse Foundation conferences host technical sessions on current topics pertinent to the Eclipse developer and the Eclipse Working Group communities, as well as sessions that demonstrate Eclipse-based tools in action.^[18]

The Eclipse Foundation hosts two major conferences each year.

EclipseCon Europe is the Eclipse Foundation’s primary European event. It provides opportunity for the European Eclipse community to learn, explore, share and collaborate on the latest ideas and information about Eclipse and its member companies.^[19]
EclipseCon France is the Eclipse Foundation's event for the French and entire European Eclipse community. Contributors, adopters, extenders, service providers, consumers, business, and research organizations gather to share their expertise and learn from each other.^[18]

Demo Camps & Stammtisch

Eclipse DemoCamps are collaborative events. DemoCamps include technical talks and demonstrations from the Eclipse community ^[20] and showcase the technology being built by the Eclipse community.^[21]

Eclipse Days and Hackathons

Eclipse Days are day-long events focused on Eclipse Technology. Eclipse Days facilitate networking and face-to-face interactions within the Eclipse Community.

Eclipse Hackathons are gatherings of developers to work on bugs and feature requests to create a patch for projects. Developers divide into small groups led by veteran of the project to complete the patch.^[22]