Eclipse Foundation


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 300 members. The Foundation focuses on key services such as: intellectual property 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.
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, scalable, 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.
The Eclipse Foundation is considered a "third generation" open-source organization, and is home to Jakarta EE, and over 375 open source projects, including runtimes, tools, and frameworks for a wide range of technology domains such as the Internet of things, Cloud and Edge Computing, Automotive, Systems Engineering, Digital Ledger Technologies, Open Processor Designs, and many others. " The most well-known of the Eclipse projects is the Eclipse platform, a multi-language software development environment and IDE".

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

Eclipse Foundation Projects

As of June 2020, the Eclipse Foundation hosts more than 375 open source projects.
There are more than 1,631 committers to Eclipse projects and more than 240 million lines of code have been contributed to Eclipse project repositories as of June 2020.

Top Level Eclipse Projects

The Foundation utilizes a hierarchical project structure. Each project stems from a primary parent project and may have sub-projects. The uppermost projects, which do not have a parent project, are called Top Level Projects.
As of July 2020, the Eclipse Foundation Top Level projects are:
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.
As of July 2020, the Eclipse Foundation hosts 13 Working Groups.
These include:

AsciiDoc

The AsciiDoc Working Group drives the standardization, adoption, and evolution of AsciiDoc. This group encourages and shapes the open, collaborative development of the AsciiDoc language and its processors in order to provide a lexicon for authoring technical content and a common interface for AsciiDoc-compatible applications and services.

Eclipse Cloud Development Tools

The will drive the evolution and broad adoption of de facto standards for cloud development tools, including language support, extensions, developer workspace definition and more.

Edge Native

The drives the evolution and broad adoption of Edge Computing-related technologies.

Internet of Things

The provides the open technology needed to build IoT devices, gateways and cloud platforms.
Eclipse SmartHome, serving as the foundation of openHAB, QIVICON and others, is a subdivision of Eclipse IoT.

Jakarta EE

The cultivates business interests related to the cloud native Java technologies.

OpenADx

The is centered around the autonomous driving toolchain and aims to bring transparency and better integration capabilities into the autonomous driving tool space.

OpenGENESIS

The openGENESIS Working Group aims to foster, support and provide knowledge, methods, and tools for the assessment of AI used in autonomous driving applications.

openMDM

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

openMobility

The shapes and fosters the development of required software tools and frameworks based on validated mobility models in order to provide a common platform for industrial applications and academic research.

openPASS

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

Science

The is a collaboration of people developing software components used for basic scientific research.

Sparkplug

The seeks to drive the evolution and broad adoption of the Eclipse Sparkplug protocol and related technologies that enable the creation of open, collaborative, and interoperable Industrial IoT solutions.

Tangle EE

The provides a governed environment for organizations and contributors to develop new ideas and applications using IOTA technologies.

Types of Membership

There are five types of membership to the Eclipse Foundation. 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.
As of October 2019, there are 11 Strategic Members. These include :
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.

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

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.
As of August 2018, there are 121 Associate Members of the Eclipse Foundation.

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.
The Eclipse Foundation hosts 3 main types of : 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.
The Eclipse Foundation's flagship event is EclipseCon. It provides opportunity for the Eclipse community to learn, explore, share and collaborate on the latest ideas and information about Eclipse and its member companies.

Demo Camps & Stammtisch

Eclipse DemoCamps are collaborative events. DemoCamps include technical talks and demonstrations from the Eclipse community and showcase the technology being built by the Eclipse community.

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.