The Eclipse Board of Stewards announced that Eclipse has re-organized, changing from an industry consortium to a not-for-profit corporation with a full-time management organization. A board of directors will be formed to oversee and staff the management organization. The board expects to announce an Executive Director in the coming weeks. IBM originally founded and largely controlled Eclipse.

The Eclipse management organization will “engage with commercial developers and consumers, academic and research institutions, standards bodies, tool interoperability groups and individual developers, plus coordinate Open Source projects,” according to Eclipse.

All technology and source code provided to this fast-growing ecosystem will remain openly available and royalty-free, according to Eclipse.

Additionally, a set of councils will be established to govern commercial participation in the open source project. Requirements, Architecture, and Planning councils will guide the development done by Eclipse Open Source projects.

Eclipse members currently total 50, divided into Strategic Developers, Strategic Consumers, Add-in Providers, and Open Source project leaders. Universities, open source projects, and other non-profit organizations may join Eclipse for free, while commercial companies can join if they base at least one project on Eclipse and pay a $5,000 fee.

Eclipse currently hosts four open source projects with 19 sub-projects.

“As mainstream IS organizations begin implementing and deploying service-oriented architectures like J2EE and .NET into new computing environments, having standardized, integrated and interoperable technologies will become increasingly important to their success. Industry consortiums like Eclipse and NetBeans that implement tools based upon standards from groups like the Object Management Group (OMG) and Java Tools Community (JTC) are well-suited to address these types of problems-especially if the groups can coordinate their efforts,” commented Gartner vice-president and research director, Michael Blechar.

For more about Eclipse, be sure to read our special report, Eclipse turns two.

 
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