Eclipse (Eclipse Foundation)
What is Eclipse (Eclipse Foundation)?
Eclipse is a free, Java-based development platform known for its plugins that allow developers to develop and test code written in other programming languages. Eclipse is released under the terms of the Eclipse Public License.
The Eclipse Foundation is an independent, nonprofit corporation based in Canada that shepherds the Open Source Eclipse software development community and includes the legal jurisdiction of the European Union.
Eclipse is supported by over 320 members, 1,750 committers and more than 332 million lines of code. The foundation's goal is to create both a community and an ecosystem of complementary products and services.
The history of the Eclipse Foundation
Eclipse started in 2001 when IBM donated three million lines of code from its Java tools to develop an open source integrated development environment (IDE).
Eclipse IDE was initially overseen by a consortium of software vendors seeking to create and foster a new community complementing Apache's open source community.
It has been said, though not confirmed, that the platform's name was derived from a secondary goal, which was to eclipse Microsoft's popular IDE, Visual Studio.
In 2011, Oracle became an Eclipse provider, donating the Hudson continuous integration server it inherited from Sun Microsystems and the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE), in 2017.
In 2016, Microsoft announced it would join the Eclipse Foundation and support the integration of Visual Studio by giving Eclipse developers full access to Visual Studio Team Services.
Eclipse's board of directors includes executive director Mike Milinkovich and strategic members from CA Technologies, IBM, Oracle and SAP.
Eclipse foundation services
The foundation supports Eclipse projects with a well-defined development process that values quality, API stability and consistent release schedules.
The Eclipse Foundation offers the following four core services to members of the Eclipse community:
- IP management
- ecosystem development process
- software marketing
- IT infrastructure
Eclipse supports over 400 open source projects, including the Eclipse platform, Jakarta EE, runtime systems and development tools to support several domains such as cloud-native applications, edge computing, the internet of things, systems engineering and open processor designs.
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