Life at Eclipse

A few weeks ago, Andrew called me into his office, and told me “I’m sure you’ve figured this out already, but I’m transgender.” To which I replied “Uhhh….I had no idea. ” I am so oddly oblivious to these sorts of things, it’s sad.

Today Andrew becomes Andrea.

Wh‎at I know already is that Andrea retains all of the attributes that made me want to work with Andrew. She is a warm, and funny person who cares deeply about the technologies, communities, and people she works with. She is committed to her family and local community. We are lucky to have her at the Eclipse Foundation, and as part of the Eclipse, Eclipse Science,  and LocationTech communities. She is on a very courageous journey of personal discovery, and to a small degree, we’re along for the ride.

‎Andrea is at once both an old and a new member of the Eclipse community. Please give her a warm welcome.

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.

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.