The Eclipse Foundation provides our global community of individuals and organizations with a mature, scalable, and business-friendly environment for open source software collaboration and innovation. The Foundation is home to the Eclipse IDE, Jakarta EE, and over 400 open source projects, including runtimes, tools, and frameworks for a wide range of technology domains such as the Internet of Things, automotive, geospatial, systems engineering, and many others.

The Eclipse Foundation is a European-based international not-for-profit association supported by over 300 member organizations who value the Foundation’s unique Working Group governance model, open innovation processes, and community-building events. Our members include industry leaders who have embraced open source as a key enabler for business strategy.

Origins

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

The Eclipse Foundation was created in January 2004 as an independent not-for-profit corporation to act as the steward of the Eclipse community. The independent not-for-profit corporation was created to allow a vendor-neutral, open, and transparent community to be established around Eclipse.

Structure

The Eclipse community consists of individual developers and organizations spanning many industries. The Foundation employs a full-time professional staff to provide services to the community. The Eclipse Foundation is funded by annual dues from our members and governed by a Board of Directors. Strategic Developers and Strategic Consumers hold seats on this Board, as do representatives
elected by Add-in Providers and Open Source committers. Eclipse committers are typically employed by organizations or are independent developers that volunteer their time to work on the Eclipse projects.

Services

The Eclipse Foundation provides four key services to the Eclipse community: 1) IP Management, 2) Ecosystem Development and Marketing, 3) Development Process, and 4) IT Infrastructure. Full-time staff are associated with each of these areas and work with the greater Eclipse community to assist in meeting the needs of stakeholders.

A Unique Model for Open Source Development

The Eclipse Foundation has been established to serve the Eclipse open source projects and the Eclipse community. As an independent not-for-profit corporation, the Foundation and the Eclipse governance model ensures no single entity is able to control the strategy, policies or operations of the Eclipse community.

The Foundation is focused on creating an environment for successful open source projects and to promote the adoption of Eclipse technology in commercial and open source solutions. Through services like IP Due Diligence, annual release trains, development community support, and ecosystem development, the Eclipse model of open source development is a unique and proven model for open source development.

Eclipse Foundation

Members 2

Project maintenance