2024 Annual Community Report
Except where otherwise noted, this report covers the period 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2024.
Executive Director’s Summary
As we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Eclipse Foundation, I am filled with gratitude and admiration for the vibrant community that has been instrumental in our journey. Your unwavering dedication and support have been the cornerstone of our success, and as we reflect on the past two decades, it is clear that our collective achievements are a testament to the power of collaboration and shared vision.
This year, we proudly mark two decades of innovation, growth, and community-driven progress. Our anniversary is not just a milestone, but a celebration of the people who have made this journey possible — our committers, contributors, members, and staff who have contributed their time, expertise, and passion to the Foundation's mission.
In this report, we are excited to highlight the significant strides we have made in expanding our presence and initiatives in Europe. Our European community has shown remarkable growth, embodying the Foundation's commitment to fostering global innovation and collaboration.
This year also marked a pivotal moment for the Foundation as we ventured into the realm of policy advocacy, influenced by the Cyber Resilience Act. This unexpected yet crucial engagement underscores our commitment to being at the forefront of addressing critical issues that impact the open source ecosystem and the wider software industry. Our involvement in policy advocacy is a new chapter in our mission, reflecting our dedication to championing the interests and sustainability of the open source community.
As we celebrate this landmark anniversary and look to the future, I extend my deepest gratitude to each and every past and present member of our community. Thank you for being an integral part of our journey. Here's to celebrating our past achievements and to the exciting opportunites that lie ahead. Together, we will continue to innovate, collaborate, and shape the future of open source.
I hope you find this annual report useful and informative. As always, we welcome input from all our community. Let us know your thoughts at emo@eclipse.org or on X @EclipseFdn.
Who We Are
The long-term success of the foundation is driven by our dedication to nurturing open source projects and communities while fostering commercially viable ecosystems around these projects. Our core mission focuses on:
- Ensuring user freedoms by providing vendor neutral governance and stewardship of our projects;
- Empowering developers and their communities with programs, infrastructure, and events; and
- Enabling collaboration through our projects and industry collaborations.
The Eclipse Foundation is led by our executive team and the board of directors.
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Mike Milinkovich — Executive Director -
Gaël Blondelle — Chief Membership Officer -
Paul Buck — VP, Community Initiatives -
Dennis Leung — VP, Program Development -
Thabang Mashologu — VP, Community & Outreach -
Michael Plagge — VP, Ecosystem Development -
Paul White — Secretary / Treasurer
Key Initiatives in 2023-24
Over the past year, the Eclipse Foundation together with its community has achieved great things. None of these achievements would be possible without the support of our members.
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Digital sovereignty remains at the core of initiatives for Europe's digital innovation, positioning the Eclipse Foundation as a pivotal player in this field. In 2023-24, we reinforced our position as the main European steward for open source of key projects contributing to European digital sovereignty; we created the Eclipse Dataspace Working Group, and Tractus-X was integrated into Catena-X that went into production in October.
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The Eclipse Foundation made significant strides in enhancing the security measures and safeguarding the supply chain of its projects, supported by OpenSSF Alpha-Omega project funding. Key initiatives included strengthening IT infrastructure, widespread adoption of two-factor authentication, refining vulnerability management processes, and upgrading development infrastructure with secure code signing. The Foundation also introduced OtterDog for efficient repository management, conducted security audits to foster a culture of security, and positioned Eclipse Temurin to achieve SLSA Level 3 compliance.
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Since the Eclipse Foundation's inception in 2004, events have played a key role in our community development; Open Community Experience 2024 is set to continue this tradition, promising to be an industry-leading conference for our vibrant community of communities.
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Eclipse Software Defined Vehicle has continued to drive forward automotive open source with 44 members and 27 projects onboarded. The inaugural SDV hackathon, quarterly community days, and the annual Automotive Open Source Summit demonstrate the growing engagement and vibrancy of the SDV community.
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Jakarta EE 11's upcoming release demonstrates the ongoing commitment to addressing the evolving needs of enterprises.
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Adoptium's Eclipse Temurin's rise to our most downloaded project, with more than 20 million downloads per month, underscores our sustained momentum in Java.
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The Eclipse IDE working group continued its support of the quarterly release drumbeat, membership grew, and a Platinum membership level was added. Their development effort program, in partnership with the IDE Planning Council, continued to fund important enhancements and release engineering support for the IDE.
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We released Sparkplug 3.0, and has been transposed to now be an ISO international standard.
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ThreadX was contributed to the Eclipse Foundation and is set to become the world's first open source real-time operating system, boasting certification for functional safety and security.
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In our commitment to fostering good governance in the adoption of open source within industry and the public sector, we maintain a pivotal role in the initiative now known as the OSPO Alliance. This year, we significantly increased our investment in this initiative to further support this community. The Good Governance Handbook has been enhanced to be more accessible, including translation into six languages. Additionally, we have introduced a new public forum to broaden our community's reach.
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Research at the Eclipse Foundation continues to grow with seven new research projects won in the following topics:
- Secure Computing Continuum (IoT, Edge, Cloud, Dataspaces)
- Cognitive Computing Continuum: Intelligence and automation for more efficient data processing (AI, data and robotics partnership)
- Coordination of the European software-defined vehicle platform
- Topic on Hardware abstraction layer for a European Vehicle Operating System
- Integration of data life cycle, architectures and standards for complex data cycles and/or human factors, language (AI, data and robotics partnership)
- Tackling European skills and labour shortages
Thus far in 2024, the foundation has been invited to participate in 48 research project proposals, which resulted in 31 proposal submissions.
Key Numbers
Projects
The Eclipse community continues to be engaged in the projects and initiatives that impact their respective communities.
30
new projects in the past year
419
Eclipse Foundation projects overall
14
European research projects supported
2,000+
committers
117
organisations participating in commits
495M
lines of code
The Eclipse Foundation's open source projects have experienced a remarkable year, showcasing significant achievements and advancements. OpenVSX, a vibrant marketplace for VS Code extensions, has become a hub for developers seeking reliable and community-vetted tools, fostering innovation and collaboration within the ecosystem. Eclipse Temurin has established itself as a cornerstone in the Java ecosystem, with its widespread adoption underscoring its reliability and excellence. Meanwhile, ThreadX is breaking new ground as the world's inaugural safety-certified open source real-time operating system.
As is our regular practice, we also consolidated and/or terminated 25 open source projects. This includes the Eclipse SOA top-level project, which was terminated, and the PMC disbanded after we moved the remaining two viable subprojects to the purview of other existing top-level projects. On behalf of the community, the EMO thanks the SOA PMC for their service. By consolidating, especially with more mature Eclipse projects, we ensure that both the committers of those projects, as well as the downstream users of those projects are better served. Terminating projects that are no longer viable or active helps preserve the Eclipse “brand” and, more importantly, puts focus on the many exceptional projects under the Eclipse umbrella.
In this same period, we received proposals for 30 new open source projects, covering a broad range of technology areas.
Industry Collaborations
In addition to our flagship Eclipse projects, our Eclipse Foundation collaborations continue to play an extremely impactful role in how our members engage and contribute!
As of 31 March 2024, we have:
21
Industry Collaborations in our portfolio spanning enterprise Java, tools, IoT, edge, automotive, operating system, and open hardware
3
New Working Groups: Open VSX, Eclipse Cyber Risk Initiative, Eclipse Dataspace
2
New Interest Groups: Models for Privacy, Eclipse ThreadX
175+
of our Strategic Members involved in at least one collaboration
220+
projects in the purview of various industry collaborations
Collectively, this high level of participation demonstrates our members' desire to work transparently and collaboratively in a vendor-neutral environment which strongly supports our "code first" approach.
Membership
We are a member-supported organisation, and we appreciate all our members' commitment and contributions. Thank You!
As of 31 March 2024, the Eclipse Foundation has 14 strategic members.
The Eclipse Foundation counted 2.057 committers as of 31 March 2024. All Committers are also entitled to membership in the Foundation, and their membership plays a valuable role in Eclipse Foundation governance, including representation on the Eclipse Board and many working group governing committees.
The Foundation counted 368 organisations as members at the end of March 2024. A total of 37 new companies joined as new members of the Foundation from 1 April 2023 through 31 March 2024.
The Foundation has continued its relationship with OpenHW Group, the Canadian-based open hardware nonprofit organisation dedicated to fostering collaboration among global hardware and software designers in developing open source cores, related IP, tools, and software. All OpenHW Group Platinum, Gold, and Silver members are also Contributing Members of the Eclipse Foundation, and as of 31 March 2024, this amounted to 47 Contributing Members.
A full list of our members can be seen on the Explore Our Members page.
New Members of the Eclipse Foundation
The new members that have joined the Eclipse Foundation between April 2023 and March 2024 include:
- Amazon Europe Core SARL
- ATOM Automotive Engineering and Technology (Nanjing) Co., Ltd
- Catena-X Automotive Network e.V
- Cirrus Logic
- co4e GmbH
- Corelab Technology Pte.Ltd
- Cypherbridge Systems LLC
- Energy Telecommunications & Electrical Associations
- FEV.io GmbH
- GPS by Design Centre
- Harman International
- International Data Spaces e.V
- Instituto Tecnológico de Informática
- Integration Objects
- iShare Foundation
- Information Systems & Databases (DBIS, Informatik 5) of RWTH Aachen University
- Jasmine Conseil SARL
- Johannes Kepler University Linz
- KU Leuven
- Litmus Automation Inc.
- Lunatech Labs B.V.
- Nordic Institute for Interoperability Solutions
- Open Forum Europe AISBL
- Politecnico di Torino
- Posit Software, PBC
- PX5
- Qualcomm Innovation Center
- Reutlingen University
- Software Mansion SA
- Sonatype Inc.
- Stadt Jena
- Storm Reply GmbH
- Synthara AG
- Technology Innovation Institute — Sole Proprietorship LLC
- The Matrix.org Foundation C.I.C.
- TOSIT Association
- Witekio Holding
Operations
The Eclipse Foundation, with its global network of members and committers, is backed by an international team spread across 11 countries, operating as Eclipse Foundation AISBL, an international not-for-profit organisation based in Brussels, Belgium.
Overall, 2023 was a strong year for the Foundation, achieving financial and operational targets, with growth driven by increasing membership and initiative participation. The fiscal year ended (31 December) with combined revenues for the Eclipse Foundation Group (see below for details) of 11.3M€, which surpassed budget expectations and a lower-than-expected net operating loss of 0.3M€.
Eclipse Foundation Income and Expenses, by Year
| 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total Revenue | 13.5 | 11.3 | 9.4 |
| Total Expenses | 14.0 | 11.6 | 8.6 | Net Income (Loss) | (0.5) | (0.3) | 0.8 |
For the 2024 fiscal year, the Board approved a budget that increases revenues to 13.5M€, with a forecasted operating loss of 0.5M€. This continues with the recent trend of revenue growth from memberships, working groups, European research initiatives, and security-focused initiatives.
Most of our funding is allocated to staff or various initiatives, segmented into broad functional areas that, collectively, enable us to deliver high-quality services that support our community’s endeavours, and directly align with the priorities established by our industry initiatives.
As a matter of governance, management provides quarterly budget updates to the Board’s finance committee, while Members receive updates on the Foundation’s membership enrollment and budget through quarterly reports in the Member Newsletter. Further, the audited 2022 financial statements and the 2023 and 2024 budgets were approved by the General Assembly of Eclipse Foundation AISBL; the 2023 audited financial statements will be presented to the General Assembly once finalised by EY.
Corporate Organisation
The Eclipse Foundation Group is a collection of four companies operated in coordination on behalf of Eclipse members. The primary organisation in which the predominance of our membership resides is Eclipse Foundation AISBL, a Belgian-based international not-for-profit. Alongside Eclipse Foundation AISBL, our operations include Eclipse.org Foundation, Inc. (our US-based legacy organisation created in 2004), Eclipse Foundation Europe GmbH (a German-based wholly owned for-profit subsidiary of Eclipse Foundation AISBL), and Eclipse Foundation Canada (a member-based Canadian not-for-profit whose members are Eclipse Foundation AISBL and Eclipse.org Foundation, Inc). These entities collaborate seamlessly, ensuring unified member management, community engagement, project support, industry partnerships, and governance. Notably, Eclipse Foundation Europe GmbH plays a vital role in community services, hosting events, and engaging in European research projects. Both Eclipse Foundation AISBL and Eclipse.org Foundation, Inc. are each designated as 501(c)6 organisations by the US Internal Revenue Service.
For the fiscal year ending 31 December 2023, EY will serve as auditor for Eclipse Foundation AISBL and Eclipse Foundation Europe GmbH, and BDO will serve as auditor for Eclipse.org Foundation, Inc. and Eclipse Foundation Canada.