Eclipse Foundation

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Eclipse Foundation Inc.
legal form Non-profit organization
founding 2004
Seat Ottawa , Canada
management Mike Milinkovich
Branch software
Website www.eclipse.org

The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit company charged with leading the Eclipse open source community and its projects. The foundation also coordinates all complementary products and services, which in internal parlance are also referred to as the ecosystem .

definition

When Eclipse is an open source community, mostly as Eclipse community called. The goal of this community is to provide a platform for the development of software within the framework of various IT projects.

The Eclipse platform software developed by the Eclipse community is also generally referred to as Eclipse and consists of various basic structures that can be easily expanded. Tools and runtime environments are also offered for the entire software development process.

The term Eclipse Foundation , on the other hand, always refers to the non-profit coordinating society.

History of the Eclipse Foundation

The first Eclipse IT project was founded by IBM in November 2001 and supported by a consortium of leading software providers. These included companies such as Borland, IBM, Rational Software, Red Hat, SuSE and TogetherSoft. In February 2004 the reorganization into a real open source project took place under the direction of the Eclipse Foundation.

With the foundation, the aim was to create an open and transparent community that was independent of providers. The Eclipse community today consists of companies and individuals from all areas of the software development industry. The technology developed by the open source community is available free of charge worldwide under the Eclipse Public License .

Funding and Membership

The foundation is mainly financed through the annual contributions of its members, with five different types of membership:

  1. As associate members , all non-profit companies, standards organizations, universities, research organizations and publishers are called, which support the development of the platform and ecosystem.
  2. Solution Members are members for whom Eclipse is an important part of their corporate strategy and who therefore participate in the development of the platform.
  3. Enterprise members are typically large companies and organizations that are heavily dependent on Eclipse for internal developments. These companies often want to influence or contribute to certain aspects and industry-related sub-areas (verticals) of the Eclipse technology or the eco system. Most of these companies are not software companies, but software consumers. Enterprise members are (as of February 2011): Motorola, Research in Motion.
  4. Strategic members are divided into developers and consumers. Both see Eclipse as the central strategic platform for their business activities. Strategic developers provide staff and other resources for the further development of Eclipse. Strategic consumers support Eclipse financially. Strategic developers are (as of September 2014): Actuate, Computer Associates (CA) , Codenvy, Google , IBM , Innoopract GmbH, itemis AG , Obeo, Oracle , SAP . In 2015, Bosch also became a strategic member.
  5. The committer members are individuals who voluntarily work as core developers on Eclipse projects and are not employed by an Eclipse member of the first three categories.

All core developers of Eclipse, regardless of whether they are committer members or employees of a member, are also generally referred to as committers .

organization

The management takes place according to US law by a mixture of supervisory board and executive board, the board of directors . All strategic developers and consumers of Eclipse are entitled to seats on this body. In contrast, the representatives of the add-in providers and committer members are elected to the Board of Directors. In addition to the Board of Directors, there are three committees that act as advisory boards to coordinate the various IT projects:

  1. The requirements advisory board is responsible for the recording and organization of requirements. For this purpose, the committee evaluates and categorizes all incoming requirements of the projects and the ecosystem, prioritizes them and agrees them for further project planning.
  2. The planning committee is responsible for the coordination and publication of software versions. To this end, he creates a release plan for the entire Eclipse platform that has been coordinated with the project planning, whereby he tries to consider all requirements equally.
  3. The architecture advisory board guarantees the long-term technical correctness of the Eclipse platforms and their frameworks. He is responsible for the development and maintenance of the Eclipse platform architecture. In addition, he ensures that the principles of the Eclipse development process are adhered to at all times by all groups and individuals involved in the development.

The Eclipse Foundation also has independent, permanent staff for administration and day-to-day business.

Services

There are four service areas:

  1. IT infrastructure: The Eclipse Foundation provides the IT infrastructure for the open source community and manages it. The IT infrastructure includes CVS / SVN repositories, Bugzilla databases, mailing lists and newsgroups, download areas and project websites. The IT infrastructure was created in order to be able to offer a reliable and expandable service platform for committers and users of Eclipse.
  2. IP Management: Another focus of work is to enable the use of open source technology in commercial products and services. The Eclipse Foundation promotes the use of Eclipse to create software products. This is made possible by the fact that Eclipse software is available free of charge under the Eclipse Public License. The Eclipse Foundation ensures at all times that all software products under its license are free of software code from other manufacturers or other rights holders. A careful review is carried out to ensure that all contributions to the Eclipse platform come from the copyright holders. For this purpose, written agreements (Committer Agreement, Member Committer Agreement) are made with all members, in which the authorship of software code and its transfer under the EPL is confirmed. All code components that were developed outside of Eclipse are checked for copyright freedom as part of the IP approval process . As part of this process, the origin of software code and its compatibility with the EPL is analyzed. Software code that is subject to incompatible licenses will be retired.
  3. Development process : The foundation supports all of its projects by introducing a uniform development process, the Eclipse Development Process . This ensures that all projects are developed in an open, transparent and powerful process. As part of this process, the Eclipse Foundation promotes a comprehensive exchange between the development teams and all other members.
  4. Expansion of the ecosystem : The organization strives to market the Eclipse technology consistently and uses a comprehensive marketing portfolio for this purpose. All products based on Eclipse technology are promoted. This applies in particular to other open source projects as well as to training providers and service providers. To expand the ecosystem, the Eclipse Foundation organizes regular events such as the EclipseCon and the Eclipse Summit Europe.

The permanent employees are each assigned to one of these four service areas. In addition, the Eclipse Foundation does not employ any independent development staff. At Eclipse, development is carried out exclusively by the aforementioned committers.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The annual Helios release is available. APA. OTS. June 23, 2010, accessed December 19, 2016 .
  2. ^ What is Eclipse and the Eclipse Foundation?
  3. ↑ Enterprise Members ( Memento of the original from December 17, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.eclipse.org
  4. ↑ Strategic Members ( Memento of the original from January 9, 2017 on WebCite ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.eclipse.org
  5. ↑ Bosch becomes a strategic member of the Eclipse Foundation