What Is Eclipse and the Eclipse Foundation?
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 350 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 501(c)(6) not-for-profit organization supported by over 275 members 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.
History of the Eclipse Project
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.
The Eclipse Community
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.
The Eclipse Foundation
The Foundation employs a full-time professional staff to provide services to the community but does not employ the open source developers, called committers, who actually work on the Eclipse projects. Eclipse committers are typically employed by organizations or are independent developers that volunteer their time to work on an open source project.
The Eclipse Foundation provides four key services to the Eclipse community: 1) IP Management, 2) Ecosystem Development, 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.
For more information, see the Eclipse Foundation home page and About Us page.
