Archive for the ‘Foundation’ Category
Eclipse Software Defined Vehicle: Building the Future of Automotive
Today the Eclipse Foundation is announcing a new working group dedicated to developing a new and innovative software platform for the world’s automotive industry. The Eclipse Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) initiative has the support of leading companies across the automotive, IT, cloud, and services industries, all of which are necessary to create the platform and ecosystem that will drive innovation for the next generation of mobility solutions.
The automotive industry today is undergoing a radical transformation. Electrification, autonomous vehicles, advanced driver assistance systems, and ever-increasing consumer expectations about their in-car digital experience, are all happening at once. These trends are dramatically transforming the system architectures embedded in vehicles. Automotive architectures are moving from networks of special purpose devices to something that more closely resembles servers on wheels, where more powerful general purpose computers are responsible for implementing and coordinating the various systems in the automobile, including the ones which keep us and our families safe on the road. And these systems architectures are rapidly changing how automotive software needs to be built.
The vision of SDV is to radically transform the automotive industry by collaboratively developing a common software platform that all participants in the automotive industry can use in an openly licensed, royalty-free manner. From an IT technology perspective this is not particularly radical. After all, open source platforms and “software defined everything” (e.g. storage, networking, data center, radio, etc.) are two of the defining trends in the IT industry over the past decade (or more). In the case of open source platforms the trend has been driven by eliminating the cost of non-differentiating software, decreasing the time to market in delivering complex systems, and reducing risk by relying on proven software platforms and components. “Software defined everything” has largely been driven by Moore’s Law and the resulting cost savings of replacing special purpose devices with general purpose computers running special purpose software.
But from an industry perspective, the technical implications of an openly licensed SDV software platform for the automotive industry are very radical. It will dramatically reshape the automotive industry similar to how software-defined networking reshaped the telecommunications industry. Free software platforms which provide a software stack for the core non-differentiating technologies will quickly lead to disruptive technical and business innovations across the value chain in any industry.
The Eclipse SDV initiative is primarily radical because it is among the first truly open industry collaborations in automotive. Historically, automotive industry groups have delivered standards or specifications available only to members of their respective consortia. Often these innovations were encumbered with FRAND-style licensing arrangements which hindered wide adoption. Eclipse SDV is going to provide a radical departure from this “business as usual” approach in automotive by focusing on open source software stacks, liberally licensed software specifications, and a community-based, collaborative approach to innovation rather than the top-down, architecture-driven, consensus-based models of the past. The mantra of Eclipse SDV is “code first”, and that is definitely a radical idea in automotive. We are humbled by the trust that Accenture, Arm, AVL, Bosch, Capgemini, Continental Automotive, DMI, ETAS, Futurewei Technologies, Karakun, Microsoft, Red Hat, Reycom, SUSE, and ZF are placing in the Eclipse Foundation to act as the steward for this exciting initiative.
I want to sincerely thank everyone who helped get this initiative off the ground and raise awareness about its value to organizations across the automotive industry.
I also want to encourage automotive industry stakeholders of all sizes and with any goals to consider joining the working group. The breadth and depth of in-vehicle software creates opportunities across every area of automotive development — from deployment, configuration, and communications to monitoring, safety, and security. If you or your organization are interested in learning more joining Eclipse SDV, please contact us.
With the Eclipse Foundation’s commitment to transparency, vendor neutrality, and a shared voice, all participants have an equal opportunity to shape the future of the SDV Working Group and play a vital role in the future evolution of the automotive industry.
To learn more about getting involved in the Software-Defined Vehicle Working Group, visit sdv.eclipse.org or email us at membership@eclipse.org.
The Eclipse Foundation #StandWithUkraine
The Eclipse Foundation supports Ukraine in the face of Russia’s invasion, an unprovoked act of aggression on a peaceful neighbor.
This war directly impacts over 30 Eclipse Foundation committers who live and work in Ukraine. Many of them work on the Eclipse Che project, which was named after the city of Cherkasy, where many of them reside. Sadly, Cherkasy is one of the many Ukrainian cities that have been attacked. Our thoughts are with our colleagues in Ukraine, along with all those impacted. We hope you and your families are safe and that this invasion comes to an end quickly.
In the short term, the cessation of war and a return to peace in Ukraine is paramount. In the longer term, it is our hope that peace and prosperity will soon flourish again.
We #StandWithUkraine
Accelerating Innovation Through Open Source – A New Eclipse Foundation eBook
Open source plays a vital role in today’s software-driven world. It’s shifted from commoditizing existing technologies, to the way new innovations achieve mainstream adoption. This can be seen in the many examples of industry-leading tools and technologies that are built on open source software, such as Eclipse ioFog, Eclipse Theia and Eclipse Che.
Our new ebook explores the many reasons why organizations around the world, across almost every industry, are developing open source strategies. Businesses that are actively involved in open source software are able to innovate more efficiently, encourage creativity on their teams, and attract and retain skilled developers.
Of course, the organizations that benefit the most from open source participation are the ones who are putting time and effort into it. In our new ebook, you’ll find out how joining the Eclipse Foundation enables organizations of all types and sizes to contribute to and benefit from open source software under a vendor-neutral governance and legal framework that is unique in the open source world.
For organizations who are already invested in open source through the creation of an Open Source Program Office (OSPO), we explore how foundation membership eases the burdens of ensuring the secure and responsible use of open source, fostering community engagement, driving contributions, and creating new projects.
We also take a look at how the move towards “software-defined everything” is impacting the automotive industry in a number of different ways. Communities such as the OpenADx Working Group, openMDM Working Group, and Eclipse Kuksa project are bringing automotive industry players together to collaborate on the non-competitive aspects of automotive development. This collaboration helps organizations reduce costs by avoiding repetitive development efforts.
A growing number of global corporations are playing a critical role in the development of open source projects through their participation in communities and working groups within the Eclipse Foundation. With 18 working groups and over 415 projects, our members are committed to innovating through open source.
To learn more about how the Eclipse Foundation helps organizations achieve their innovation goals, download Accelerating Innovation Through Open Source.
IoT & Edge Developer Priorities and Challenges
The results of the Eclipse Foundation’s seventh annual IoT & Edge Developer Survey have been compiled and the report is available to download. As in previous years, this year’s survey provides important insights into developer trends and challenges, platform choices, and target markets.
Administered by the Eclipse IoT Working Group, the Edge Native Working Group, and the Sparkplug Working Group, this year’s survey was conducted over a period of seven weeks, starting in late August. We received responses from more than 660 developers, committers, architects, and decision-makers from a broad set of industries and organizations globally.
What Technologies are Developers Choosing?
- IoT and edge developers told us they’re using C and C++ for constrained devices, but prefer Python over Java for edge servers, IoT and edge gateways, and cloud platform development.
- MQTT has emerged as the clear leader in industrial IoT (IIoT) communications protocols. It showed solid growth in adoption over the past year, while protocols such as REST, HTTP/HTTPS, and TCP/IP showed a significant decline in IIoT usage compared to 2020.
- AWS IoT is the preferred middleware, with a significant lead over Microsoft Azure IoT and Google Cloud IoT Platform.
- Artificial intelligence is still the most frequently selected edge computing workload.
- While Arm continues to dominate hardware architectures for constrained devices, gateways, and edge servers, RISC-V and OpenHW Group CORE-V architectures are showing strong market share gains.
Industrial Automation Is the Top Industry Focus Area
While industrial automation has displaced smart agriculture as the leading industry focus area, that doesn’t mean efforts on smart agriculture applications are dropping off. In fact, developer focus on smart agriculture rose seven percent from the 2020 survey results. However, focus on industrial automation rose 13 percent, indicating a sharp increase in demand for these types of applications.
Building automation, emergency management, and smart cities rounded out the top five industry focus areas.
Security Is the Top Concern
Almost half of this year’s survey respondents cited security as their primary worry when developing IoT and edge applications. However, concerns about connectivity, deployment, and integration complexity also rose this year, painting a picture of a changing landscape.
The results underscore the challenges developers face in determining which are the right technologies for the job. They also indicate that more IoT and edge solutions are moving past the proof-of-concept phase as developers look for technologies that help them optimize and integrate production systems to deliver better user experiences.
Get Involved in Eclipse IoT & Edge Native Communities
To stay current with the happenings in the Eclipse IoT Working Group, join the mailing list here.
To join the Eclipse Edge Native Working Group conversation on Slack, click here.
Read the Full Report
For detailed insights, Download the IoT & Edge Developer Survey Results
Celebrating Eclipse at 20
Today the Eclipse project and the Eclipse Foundation are shipping Eclipse IDE 2021‑12, the latest in a string of releases that go back to November 2001. How better to mark its 20th anniversary than to celebrate another release!
Last month we published a press release and a landing page to celebrate twenty years of Eclipse history, which we are augmenting today with a celebration video that includes great segments from Eclipse project leaders, both past and present. I highly recommend taking the time to watch it to learn about the history of this ground breaking open source project, as well as hearing where the community plans to take it in the future. And, definitely don’t miss the guitar solo at the end! I would like to thank the members of the original Eclipse project team who participated: Erich Gamma (Microsoft), John Duimovich (Red Hat), Steve Northover (IBM), and Paul Buck (Eclipse Foundation). I would also like to thank Sarika Sinha (IBM) and Mickael Istria (Red Hat), who joined the video to talk about the project today and who continue to make the Eclipse IDE a great platform for developers around the world.
It is impossible to overstate the impact that the Eclipse IDE has had on the software industry, the open source community, and the Java ecosystem. Envisioned originally as “a kind of universal tool platform – an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in particular”, The Eclipse project and platform can be celebrated for many milestones. Here are just a few:
- The technology itself was groundbreaking. Using the Java language, while utilizing the desktop UI frameworks, made the Eclipse IDE a fast and attractive solution for the enterprise developers of the day. Don’t forget that the original design intent was to compete with Microsoft’s Visual Studio and ensure that the Java ecosystem had an ecosystem of professional tools. Coupling that with the most extensible architecture ever seen in a tooling platform made the Eclipse IDE perfect for its time. No one can dispute that the Eclipse IDE was part of the overall value equation that allowed Java to become dominant in the enterprise.
- The Eclipse Rich Client Platform was based on the insight that if you could build desktop-portable IDEs, you could re-use that platform for building desktop-portable applications. Pre-dating the Web 2.0 technologies that we now all use, RCP was the go-to technology for building portable desktop applications in the enterprise for a decade. RCP was used extensively in banking, insurance, and healthcare (to name just a few) as the basis for the applications that millions of people used every day.
- Language support was another key Eclipse win. Although to this day many developers think of the Eclipse IDE as Java-centric, it was used to create language IDEs for almost every available programming language. Today the Eclipse C/C++ Development Tools (CDT) project remains the dominant platform used by the embedded and RTOS markets for their developer tools. Arm, Renesas, Xilinx, ST Micro, NXP, etc. all ship Eclipse IDE-based products today.
- The “Eclipse Way” of development, first described by Erich Gamma and John Weigand at EclipseCon so many years ago, explained how an open source project could sustainably deliver high quality code on a predictable schedule. And those processes still work today, as we celebrate yet another Eclipse IDE release delivered on time to the day. For over 16 years now, that highly predictable schedule delivered by an open source community has been a marvel of mature development processes embraced by a community.
- While commonplace today, the Eclipse project was one of the first (if not the first) projects to consciously create a consortium of industry players in support of an open source community. It is hard to overstate how novel this was in 2001, when the professionalization of open source was an entirely new idea. I can confirm that the experiment was a success.
But none of this would have been possible without the hard work and dedication of literally hundreds of people over the years. Initially created by the IBM subsidiary Object Technology International, the Eclipse IDE in its early days was very much an IBM-led project. The Eclipse Foundation was created in 2004 as a vendor-neutral home for the project in order to help build trust amongst potential adopters, and to steward a community. By all measures that strategy was a success, with many IBM competitors joining the Eclipse Foundation and creating tools on top of the platform. After a few years, Eclipse adopters were a who’s who of the industry at the time, including BEA Systems, Blackberry, Borland, Computer Associates, Compuware, HP, Intel, Motorola, Nokia, Oracle, SAP, Sybase, and Wind River.
The success in growing the Eclipse ecosystem resulted in an increase in potential contributors, and today the Eclipse Project is incredibly diverse with over a dozen different companies supporting committers on the project. On behalf of the entire community, I would like to thank each and every one of the committers and contributors who have and continue to make the Eclipse IDE a success.
And finally, twenty years is a long time. I would also like to thank and remember the team members who I knew personally that are no longer with us to enjoy this moment. Jeem and Dani, you are missed.
Life at Eclipse 