Archive for the ‘Foundation’ Category
Proposal: Funding Eclipse Platform Development
Last month I announced that the Eclipse Foundation is going to begin using personal and corporate donations to fund Eclipse platform development. Of course, the devil is in the details, and as an open source community we need to define an open and transparent process for how work is prioritized, and funds are allocated. Today, we are publicizing a draft document that lays out such a process.
One thing that we know is that the process can seem sort of heavyweight when you first read it. Be assured that we will be putting together some open-ended work packages to ensure that it remains lightweight and agile as possible.
If you have any comments or feedback, please post them on the ide-dev@eclipse.org list (subscribe here).
We are looking forward to your feedback!
JetBrains Lockin: We Told You So
The news this morning that JetBrains is switching to a subscription-only model is a perfect example of why and how trusting a proprietary tools vendor leaves you and your business exposed to the whims of their profit margins. Make no mistake: this is motivated by what’s good for their business, not what is good for the developer community. Even if JetBrains backpedals on this decision, it is a lesson worth learning.
Eclipse is the only truly community-based tooling platform. We are 100% open source from top to bottom. There is no “Community Edition”. It’s all open source. We are not beholden to any vendor’s agenda.
We are well aware that IntelliJ is a great product. We are also aware that Eclipse has not been moving forward as quickly as we would have liked this last few years. But we are actively working to change things, and you — the developer community — can help. First of all, the Eclipse platform is now a truly open and community-driven project. Your time and code contributions will be welcomed. Also, we recently announced that 100% of all personal donations will be directed to funding Eclipse enhancements. So you can help in your personal capacity by donating even a fraction of JetBrain’s subscription fees to Eclipse. Just as importantly, we will take directed corporate donations to fund Eclipse enhancements as well. Is there a couple of missing features that is slowing down your company’s use of Eclipse? We can fix those for a fraction of what JetBrains wants to extract from your employer.
Eclipse is a true free and open source software community, focused on the needs of developers everywhere. Let’s use this opportunity to re-invest in it so that it is the tool that you want to use every day. For free. Now and forever.
Users can now fund development work on Eclipse
Today, we are significantly lowering the barriers for companies and individuals to actively invest in the ongoing development of the Eclipse platform. Eclipse has an amazing community of individuals and companies that invest significant amount of resources in the development of Eclipse open source projects. We also have a huge community of users that benefit from Eclipse technology. They use Eclipse tools and technology to build their software products and applications. Most of these users don’t have the time required to participate in an open source project but they do want to see ongoing improvements and investment in Eclipse. We now have a way for these users to invest in Eclipse improvements.
We are pleased to announce the Eclipse Foundation has begun to fund development work on Eclipse projects. In fact, there are a number of features and issues in the Mars release that were funded through the Foundation. The initial focus is on improving the core Eclipse platform, JDT and Web Tools. As the program expands we expect the list of projects will grow too. The process by which funds will be allocated is still a work in progress, but will be made available soon. It will be based on the core principles of openness and transparency.
The funding for the development work will come from individuals and corporate users. Earlier this year, Ericsson provided the Eclipse Foundation funds to improve the Eclipse platform which resulted in SWT, GTK3 and PDE improvements available in the Mars release. Ericsson is a large user of Eclipse and they see the value of investing in ongoing improvements. We hope other large corporate users of Eclipse will follow Ericsson’s lead.
We are also pleased to announce that all users’ donations to our Friends of Eclipse program will be used to fund Eclipse development work. Last year we raised over $120,000 from the Friends of Eclipse program, so we hope the ability to directly fund Eclipse development will significantly increase the donations we gain from our individual user community. To make things even easier, we have added Bitcoin as a payment option. Please take this opportunity to help improve Eclipse by making a donation.
Eclipse open source development will continue to move forward through work of our committer community. Committers are the heart and soul of any open source project. However, we are confident having additional investment from our user community will help accelerate future improvement to Eclipse. If you are a user of Eclipse, individual or corporate, it is now simple to participate in the future of Eclipse.
Eclipse Ships Luna SR1a Git Security Release
Several weeks ago, the Git community announced a new 2.2.1 release which fixed a serious security vulnerability. You can read more here and here. The Eclipse JGit project had their fix available the day that the vulnerability was announced. However, since the vast majority of Eclipse users get their Eclipse via the packages, the decision was made to make new versions of those available as well. I am happy to announce that as of 10:00am Eastern this morning, those new packages are now available for download from Eclipse.
This is the first time the Eclipse community has done a re-spin of our current release for a security issue. Congratulations and thank yous are due to many people, but in particular the JGit project, the webmaster team, and to David Williams and Markus Knauer for all the hard work necessary to make this happen.
Eclipse users who use Git or GitHub through their Eclipse Workbench should either download the new package, or use “Help > Check for Updates” to update their existing installation.
The Internet of Things Will be Built on Open Source
This post was originally published on the Bosch Connected World Blog.
The Internet of Things is poised to become the next wave of technology to fundamentally change how humanity works, plays, and interacts with their environment. It is expected to transform everything from manufacturing to care for the elderly. The internet itself has — in twenty short years — dramatically transformed society. This scale of change and progress is about to be repeated, in perhaps even larger and more rapid ways. New ventures will emerge, existing businesses will be disrupted, and everywhere the incumbents will be challenged with new technologies, processes, and insight.
It is important to recognize that the internet is successful because it is one of the most radically open technology platforms in history. The fundamental protocols of the internet were invented in the 1970’s, and put in the public domain in the late 1980’s. The world-wide web was invented at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which made it free for everyone. In subsequent years, open source technologies such as Linux, the Apache web server and the Netscape / Firefox browser ensured that the basic infrastructure for the web is based on open source. The technology behemoths of our day such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter are only able to scale their infrastructure and their business models by relying on open source. In short: our modern digital world is built on open source software.
The Internet of Things will be implemented using open source software platforms. There is utterly no alternative to this outcome. Anyone who says otherwise is fooling themselves.
There are four reasons why this is true.
- Scale: Depending on which analyst you prefer, the next decade will see between 50 and 70 billion sensors being deployed on Earth. This will require tens, if not hundreds of millions of routers, gateways, and data servers. There is simply no way to achieve those levels of scale without relying on open source software to drive the vast majority of that infrastructure. Any other approach will simply be unaffordable, and will be out-competed by the economies of scale achievable by the open source alternatives.
- Freedom to Innovate: Open source software allows permission-less innovation. In particular, open source allows innovation by integration, where developers create new and novel systems by combining freely available open source components. This approach is somewhere between difficult and impossible for proprietary software stacks, where the vendor has to drive all of the invention.
- Inter-operability: I am a big believer in open standards, and firmly believe that they will be an integral part of the IoT. However, it has been proven time and again that the best possible way to have a new technology achieve rapid adoption is by combining open standards with a robust open source implementation. OSS implementations provide an easy adoption path, near-perfect interoperability with others, and reduces the cost of entering the market. In a world where developers are becoming one of the most precious of commodities, it makes no sense to waste them on implementing a standard. They should be focused on building software which provides the firm with product differentiating features that customers value.
- Developers: Lastly, recruiting and enabling developers is a key, and often overlooked part of any IoT strategy. By the end of this decade the number of IoT developers needs to grow from a few hundred thousand to over four million. Today’s developers demand open source solutions and tools. Even a decade ago, technology acquisition was largely a top-down process. Now technology choices are largely made bottom-up, by developers experimenting with open source components and integrating them into a solution.
For these reasons, IoT is rapidly becoming a strategic area of focus for the Eclipse community. From three projects two years ago the Eclipse IoT community has grown to seventeen projects, implementing protocols, device gateway frameworks, vertical frameworks, and tools for the needs of IoT developers.
Bosch has been an active member of the Eclipse Foundation since March 2010. Their initial focus was on the Automotive Working Group, which has been working on tools and methods for automotive embedded systems. Its subsidiary Bosch Software Innovations (BoschSI) is one of the world’s thought leaders in driving open source platforms for the Internet of Things. They have recognized its importance, and with contributions such as the Eclipse Vorto project are helping to make it a reality. The Eclipse Foundation values the partnership that we have with the development teams, and look forward to a long and fruitful collaboration.
The digital world we have today is built on open source technologies. The Internet of Things will be too. Come join the Eclipse IoT community to help make that happen
Life at Eclipse 