What is Eclipse?
Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on providing a vendor-neutral open development platform and application frameworks for building software. The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit corporation formed to advance the creation, evolution, promotion, and support of the Eclipse Platform and to cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products, capabilities, and services.
As it says in the Purposes section of the Foundation’s Bylaws:
The purpose of Eclipse Foundation Inc.,(the “Eclipse Foundation”), is to advance the creation, evolution, promotion, and support of the Eclipse Platform and to cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products, capabilities, and services.
Eclipse has formed an independent open eco-system around royalty-free technology and a universal platform for tools integration. Eclipse based tools give developers freedom of choice in a multi-language, multi-platform, multi-vendor environment. Eclipse provides a plug-in based framework that makes it easier to create, integrate and utilize software tools, saving time and money. By collaborating and exploiting core integration technology, tool producers can leverage platform reuse and concentrate on core competencies to create new development technology. The Eclipse Platform is written in the Java language and comes with extensive plug-in construction toolkits and examples. It has already been deployed on a range of development workstations including Linux, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, QNX, Mac OS X and Windows based systems. A full description of the Eclipse community and white papers documenting the design and use of the Eclipse Platform are available at http://www.eclipse.org.
You can learn more about the structure and mission of the Eclipse Foundation by reading the formal documents that establish how the foundation operates, and by reading the press release announcing the creation of the independent organization.
For software licensing, website terms of use, and legal FAQs, please see our legal stuff page. Eclipse logos and graphics are found on our eclipse logos page.
History of Eclipse
Industry leaders Borland, IBM, MERANT, QNX Software Systems, Rational Software, Red Hat, SuSE, TogetherSoft and Webgain formed the initial eclipse.org Board of Stewards in November 2001. By the end of 2003, this initial consortium had grown to over 80 members.
On Feb 2, 2004 the Eclipse Board of Stewards announced Eclipse’s reorganization into a not-for-profit corporation. Originally a consortium that formed when IBM released the Eclipse Platform into Open Source, Eclipse became an independent body that will drive the platform’s evolution to benefit the providers of software development offerings and end-users. All technology and source code provided to and developed by this fast-growing community is made available royalty-free via the Eclipse Public License.
With the change to an independent not-for-profit corporation, a full-time Eclipse management organization has been established to engage with commercial developers and consumers, academic and research institutions, standards bodies, tool interoperability groups and individual developers, plus coordinate the open source projects. To maintain a reliable and accessible development roadmap, a set of councils (Requirements, Architecture and Planning) will guide the development done by Eclipse Open Source projects. With the support of over 115 member companies, Eclipse already hosts 9 major Open Source projects that include a total of over 50 subprojects.
To oversee and staff this new management organization, Eclipse has established a Board of Directors drawn from four classes of membership: Strategic Developers, Strategic Consumers, Add-in Providers and Open Source project leaders.
Developers and Strategic Consumers hold seats on this Board, as do representatives elected by Add-in Providers and Open Source project leaders. Strategic Developers, Strategic Consumers and Add-in Providers contribute annual dues. The founding Strategic Developers and Strategic Consumers are Ericsson, HP, IBM, Intel, MontaVista Software, QNX, SAP and Serena Software. In August 2004, Actuate joined the Eclipse Board as a Strategic Developer.
In the Eclipse Platform, code access and use is controlled through the Eclipse Public License, which allows individuals to create derivative works with worldwide re-distribution rights that are royalty free. Those who use the Eclipse Platform may also want to use one or more of the official Eclipse logos found on our artwork page.
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