Skip to main content
2015 Annual Eclipse Community Report

2015 Annual Eclipse Community Report


Published June 2015

Welcome to the fourth annual Eclipse Foundation Community Report. Comments and feedback on the style and content would be appreciated at emo@eclipse.org.

Except where noted this report will cover the period April 1, 2014 to March 31, 2015.

Who We Are

Our Bylaws define the Eclipse Foundation in this way:

The Eclipse technology is a vendor-neutral, open development platform supplying frameworks and exemplary, extensible tools (the "Eclipse Platform"). Eclipse Platform tools are exemplary in that they verify the utility of the Eclipse frameworks, illustrate the appropriate use of those frameworks, and support the development and maintenance of the Eclipse Platform itself; Eclipse Platform tools are extensible in that their functionality is accessible via documented programmatic interfaces. The purpose of Eclipse Foundation Inc., (the "Eclipse Foundation"), is to advance the creation, evolution, promotion, and support of the Eclipse Platform and to cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products, capabilities, and services.

This makes the Eclipse community a unique open source community. Not only are we interested in building open source code, we are equally committed to creating a commercially successful ecosystem around that code. This combination of interests has been a key part of Eclipse's success.

In short, our vision for the Eclipse community is

To be the leading community for individuals and organizations to collaborate on commercially-friendly open source software

Strategy

The following are the strategic goals of the Eclipse Foundation for 2015, as set by the Board of Directors.

    Be the developer platform of choice. The goal of Eclipse is to define a development platform that is freely licensed, open source and provides support for the full breadth of the application lifecycle, in many disparate problem domains, and across the development and deployment platforms of choice, including embedded, desktop and the web.

    Promote the Eclipse community as the place to collaborate in emerging technology domains. Obviously this is an ambitious goal, as new technology domains and trends are constantly evolving. The Eclipse Foundation staff and leading members of our community work steadily to recruit new projects in emerging technology areas.

    Recruit and foster Eclipse projects in those domains. It is an important part of the Foundation's role to be recruiting new projects in areas outside of Eclipse's historical strengths in tools and IDEs. Some recent successes would include the surge in new projects related to the model-driven tools for systems engineering, the Internet of Things (IoT), science, and location-aware or geospatial technologies.

    Create value for all its membership classes. The Eclipse Foundation serves many members whose primary interest is leveraging Eclipse technologies in proprietary offerings such as products and services. The Eclipse Foundation will focus its energies to ensure that commercial opportunity exists within the Eclipse ecosystem. Look for continuous improvements to Eclipse Marketplace, and for other initiatives that benefit members.

    Committers are also members of the Eclipse Foundation and are in many ways its backbone. The Eclipse Foundation and its staff will continue to look for opportunities to improve services to its project community throughout the year. Look for continuous improvements to our web, download, code management, build and other key components of project infrastructure in 2015.

    Foster growth of our communities and ecosystems. The creation of a large community of commercial and open source organizations that rely on and/or complement Eclipse technology has been a major factor in the success of Eclipse. Each time Eclipse technology is used in the development of a product, service or application the Eclipse community is strengthened. Our goal in 2015 is to focus our attention on the creation of working groups and new Eclipse projects that focus on particular industry segments such as IoT, web development, mobile, automotive, science, and finance.

    Continue to grow a diversified revenue model. Reliance on a single source of revenue to fund the Foundation puts us at greater risk of being negatively impacted by industry specific business cycles. It is a goal of the Eclipse Foundation to ensure revenue sources from multiple types of organizations, and seek other sources such as events and sponsorships.

Some Key Decisions

Over the past year, the Board has made a number of strategic decisions that will impact how Eclipse evolves in the future. A brief summary of these is listed below. More details can be found in the minutes of the Board, found on our website.

    Development Funding. The Eclipse Foundation has begun to accept targeted corporate contributions to fund enhancements to the Eclipse Java and Java EE IDEs. As an initial success in January 2015 Ericsson provided the Eclipse Foundation the funds to enhance the Eclipse platform that resulted in SWT, Mac platform, GTK3, and PDE improvements available in the Mars release.

    FOSS4G NA. Working with the LocationTech and OSGeo communities, the Eclipse Foundation produced FOSS4G North America, co-located with EclipseCon North America. Adding a fourth conference to our event schedule was a big undertaking for the Foundation staff, and we were delighted with the positive feedback we received from the open source geospatial community.

Membership

The Eclipse Foundation welcomed three new strategic members to the Board of Directors in the past year. In June 2014, Codenvy became a strategic member and committed to creating the Eclipse Che project to host their cloud-based development tooling platform. In the first quarter of 2015, CEA List and Red Hat both increased their membership level from Solutions to Strategic Developer. CEA List leads the Papyrus modeling project, and is deeply involved in the PolarSys Working Group. Red Hat leads the Thym and Linux Tools projects, and invests numerous resources in the Eclipse and Web Tools Platform projects.

The Foundation finished 2014 with a total of 222 members. By the end of March 2015, that number had increased to 230. A total of 55 companies joined as new members of the Foundation in 2014 and Q1 2015. These companies include, All4Tec, Bertrandt, BonitaSoft, BTC, Canonical Group Limited, Canoo Engineering AG, Cluster Edit, Codefresh, Codenvy, Commonwealth Computer Research Inc, Contrast Security, Daimler AG, DB NETZ AG, dc-square GmbH, Deutsche Telekom, Diamond Light Source, DocDoku, Epos Cat GMBH, ESI, Esito AS, EUROFORUM Deutschland SE , GadgetKeeper, Gigatronics Ingolstadt GmbH, Glob3 Mobile Inv, Gradle Inc, HighQsoft ,Industrial Internet Consortium, IS2T, Kichwa Coders, Litmus Automation, Logi Cals GmbH, Mapbox, Michigan State University, Mousebird Consulting, Mueller BBM VibroAkustik Systeme GmbH, Nspyre BV, OpenHab UG, Ordnance Survey, Peak Solution GmbH, Piterion GmbH, Planet Labs, Rapicorp, Science + Computing, Software Quality Systems, Solair srl, Tata Motors, TECH Advantage, Universite Joseph Fourier, University of Calgary, Uppsala University, UT-Battelle, Vaadin, Volkswagon of America, Inc, WSO2 Inc and Zeligsoft.

Working Groups

The recruitment of new projects and members has been greatly assisted by the strategy of creating working groups (WG). As participation in WGs grows, our membership has grown and diversified into different industries such as automotive, aerospace, geospatial, and the Internet of Things.

  • Automotive. Activity in this group has been low in the past year, but has started up again recently. Most notable are the activities driven by the Almathea4Public research project, which has led to the creation of the APP4MC project proposal. The APP4MC project aims to provide a tool chain environment and de-facto standard to integrate tools for all major design steps in the multi- and many-core development phase. The Eclipse Foundation is a partner in the Amalthea4Public research project, taking the responsibility to host the open source project and support Amalthea4Public in dissemination and outreach efforts. Just recently, activities have been increasing, and closer communication with openMDM and PolarSys have been discussed.

  • Internet of Things (IoT). The Eclipse IoT Working Group continued to gain momentum in 2014 towards its goal of creating an open source community for IoT. At JavaOne 2014 the Eclipse IoT community announced an Open IoT Stack for Java to make it easier for Java developers to connect and manage devices in an IoT solution. Based on open source and open standards, the Open IoT Stack for Java simplifies IoT development by allowing developers to re-use a core set of frameworks and services in their IoT solutions. The Open IoT Stack supports popular IoT standards such MQTT, CoAP and Lightweight M2M (LWM2M), and also provides a set of services for building IoT gateways.

    In the past year, there were 16 different open source projects that were focused on IoT, including six new projects:

    • Ignite|IoT - a methodology for implementing IoT solutions
    • RISE V2G - an implementation of the IEC 15118 standard that defines the communication between an electrical vehicle and a charging station.
    • Leshan - an implementation of the Lightweight M2M standard from the Open Mobile Alliance
    • Vorto - a toolset and repository to enable IoT device integration
    • 4DIAC - an open source infrastructure for distributed Industrial Process Measurement and Control Systems (IPMCS) based on the IEC 61499 standard
    • tinydtls - a light-weight implementation of the DTLS protocol that can be used in devices with tight memory constraints

    The membership of the IoT working group grew to 20 members, including IBM, Eurotech, Sierra Wireless, Bosch, Cannocial, itemis, SMB, openHab, Actuate, Cisco, IS2T, 2lemetry, Deutsche Telekom, ibh Systems, bitreactice, M2M Alliance, DC Square, Gadget Keeper, Litmus Automation and LAS-CNRS.

  • LocationTech. LocationTech is a large, active, and fast growing community focused on developing advanced location aware technologies. The working group has continued to grow during its second year, reaching 14 projects and more than 45 committers. The group is supported by 17 member organizations. LocationTech has become the community of choice for big geo data technologies including the GeoTrellis, GeoMesa, GeoJinni, and GeoWave projects. It is also home to important libraries such as JTS Topology Suite, Spatial4J, and libspatialindex. LocationTech hosts a range of applications (uDig, GeoGig and GeoScript) along with user interface projects Geo Fast Forward (GEOFF) and Mobile Map Technology. Applications include GeoGig, GeoScript an uDig. The current LocationTech technology base is approximately two million lines of code.

    New LocationTech members in the last year include Ordnance Survey, the United Kingdom’s National Mapping Agency, Mapbox, and the University of Calgary.

    The LocationTech community has been active, participating in over 40 events. These included conferences, meetups, code sprints, intern programs, and work with Universities. The 2014 LocationTech tour was the largest yet with more than 1,200 people participating in a federated series of events around the world.

    LocationTech project mentors worked with over 50 university student proteges in 2015. These interns added useful features to the participating projects. Thank you to them, and special thanks to the Facebook Open Academy and Google Summer of Code programs for their support.

    New technologies that joined the group in 2014 include:

    • GeoWave - a scalable spatio-temporal database that provides query capabilities on very large datasets using cloud platforms.
    • SFCurve - a Scala library for the creation, transformation, and querying of space-filling curves. This is an important component for services which store and process spatial data.
    • Libspatialindex - a C/C++ library for implementation of spatial indexes.
    • TeamENGINE - a framework that provides a test harness for tests that check conformance of implementations to OGC standards.

  • Long Term Support. The LTS Working Group introduced a trial membership for service providers in 2014. With this program we were able to sign up new members such as Bredex, Xored, itemis, CodeTrails and Obeo. In addition, an Eclipse Marketplace category for long-term support was added. The participating companies now provide good support coverage for many Eclipse projects. The LTS website has been reworked and a form for support requests has been added. However, the current number of support requests is below expectations. The group is reaching out to potential customers to explain the value of the offering.

  • OpenMDM. The openMDM Working Group was founded in July 2014, and is focused on providing tools, systems, qualification kits, and adapters for standardized and vendor independent management of measurement data in accordance with the ASAM ODS standard. The founding members were the German car makers Audi, BMW and Daimler together with Canoo Engineering, Gigatronik, HighQSoft GmbH Peak Solution GmbH and science + computing ag.

    Throughout the year and in early 2015, more companies joined the working group and two projects were created, providing access to the ODS server in the platform components project as well as client interfaces through web and rich client technologies. The group is planning to provide demonstrators based on the new implementation for the technology in the second half of 2015.

  • PolarSys. In the past year the PolarSys Working Group has continued to create comprehensive toolchains for the development of embedded systems. The working group membership continues to grow, with an average of one new member joining per quarter. In 2014, new members included Artal Group, Zeligsoft, ESI Group and Airbus Helicopters.

    PolarSys members initiated a number of new projects over the past year that significantly improve the capabilities offered by PolarSys.

    • Chess (created in February 2014) - a Papyrus customization for component based development of high integrity systems
    • Gendoc (created in February 2014) - migrated from the Topcased community to provide capabilities to generate documentation from models
    • Reqcycle (created in February 2014) - addresses both requirement management and requirement traceability in the tool chain
    • Kitalpha (created in April 2014) - a modeling component that implements the ISO/IEC 42010 standard for system description in system and software engineering
    • Titan (created in August 2014) - the TTCN-3-based test toolset widely used within Ericsson, providing Eclipse-based and command line user interfaces, and multi-platform support
    • Trace Compass (created in September 2014) - a tool for viewing and analyzing both logs and traces
    • Capella (created in September 2014) - a model driven engineering solution based on a graphical modeling workbench for engineers developing systems, software and hardware architectures
    • COTSAQ (created in October 2014) - provides a web based solution for managing Intellectual Property of software and systems
    • Eclipse Safety Framework (created in February 2015) - provides a set of tools that enable both modelling and analysis of safety concerns in the context of modelling standards such as SysML and MARTE

    The main technical achievement is the creation of a systematic Maturity Assessment for the PolarSys projects. This approach, which is still under deployment, enables a better understanding of the PolarSys projects ecosystem by interested parties who cannot invest in becoming project committers.

    PolarSys also introduced the PolarSys solutions which were publicly announced during Embedded World Conference in February 2015. With PolarSys solutions, we want to bridge the gap between PolarSys open source projects and the level of documentation and marketing material users expect to typically find with an industrial tool. The main result of this initiative is the creation of a press kit with data sheets that introduce the Polarsys solutions (http://www.polarys.org/solutions).

    PolarSys members participated to two events focused on embedded systems: ERTS in Toulouse in February 2014, and Embedded World Conference in Nuremberg in February 2015. In order to address the North American market, PolarSys members will participate in the INCOSE Symposium in 2015.

  • Science. The Science Working Group (SWG), hosted by Eclipse, works to solve the problems of making science software inter-operable and interchangeable. In its first year, SWG established its charter, developed its first web site, and its first 11 members joined including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Diamond Light Source, IBM, Itema, Lablicate, MARINTEK, Clemson University, The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, Kichwa Coders, Uppsala University, Tech’Advantage, and IFP Energies nouvelles.

    In its first year, the following projects joined the group:

    • DAWNSci - defines Java interfaces for data description, plotting and plot tools, data slicing and file loading. It defines an architecture oriented around OSGi services to do this. It provides a reference implementation and examples for the interfaces.
    • ICE - provides capabilities for modeling and simulation including setting up the model, launching the job, analysing the results and managing the input and output data.
    • ChemClipse - an Eclipse RCP chemistry application designed to handle analytical data from chromatographic/spectrometric systems like GC/MS or GC/FID. These systems are used e.g. to identify environmental pollutants, in forensics, to ensure the harmlessness of groceries or in the area of industrial quality control processes.

    The Science Working Group participated in a number of events including Science Day at EclipseCon, and a Science track as part of the programs at EclipseCon France and EclipseCon Europe. An afternoon session was held at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in December and was well attended. The Science WG has been presented at the EGU (European Geosciences Union General) Assembly 2015 in Vienna.

Conferences and Events

The EclipseCon conferences, Eclipse Days and DemoCamps are the primary events that the Eclipse Foundation supports to help foster the strong personal relationships in the community that only face-to-face contact can create. We highly encourage all Eclipse community members to participate in these events.

The second edition of EclipseCon France was held in June 2014 and had 251 attendees. EclipseCon France introduced an Unconference that provided an opportunity for Eclipse Working Groups to organize workshops, brainstorming sessions, and hackathons to foster collaboration.

With a growing Eclipse ecosystem in Europe, EclipseCon Europe also continues to grow. Co-located with the OSGi Community event, we welcomed 600 attendees to the conference. We received a very positive feedback from our sponsors, attendees and exhibitors. EclipseCon Europe 2014 was a lot of fun with new ideas like the IoT Playground and integrated events such as BPM Day and Project Quality Day.

In March 2015 EclipseCon North America and FOSS4G NA were co-located in Burlingame, California. Overall attendance was 775, of which 430 were FOSS4G, making it the largest FOSS4G NA to date. The Eclipse Foundation, on behalf of the LocationTech working group, played a significant role in organizing FOSS4G NA, an event featuring technologies from OSGeo, LocationTech, and others. Roughly 30 percent of FOSS4G attendees were women, which was more than double the historic proportion in a FOSS4G conference of this size.

Financials

The Eclipse Foundation's fiscal year end is December 31. Our auditors are the firm Deloitte & Touche, LLP. The Eclipse Foundation is incorporated in the State of Delaware, USA as a 501(c)6 not-for-profit. Its headquarters is located in Ottawa, Canada.

Membership renewals remained strong, working group revenue and website advertising both continued to grow. Despite originally budgeting a $0.6M loss, the Eclipse Foundation controlled expenses to result in a reduced shortfall of $0.4M. The organization continues to be on a solid financial footing.

In US $ millions

2012


2013


2014

Revenue

4.1


4.5


4.3

Expenses

4.2


4.4


4.7

Net Income

-0.1


0.1


-0.4

Intellectual Property Management

During the time period spanning April 1, 2014 to March 31, 2015, the Eclipse Foundation received 1,275 requests for code review and completed 1,302 reviews.[1] As more Projects come on board, the need for code review continues to grow, particularly for the Eclipse Foundation’s working groups. In January 2015, the backlog of requirements reached an all time high of 307, slightly edging out the previous high of 306 reached in 2012. The result has been an increased delay in completing IP reviews for some projects. In an effort to address this issue, an additional IP analyst will be hired in 2015.


As of the time of writing, the IP team remains focused on the Mars Release Train submissions which came in at 73, consistent with the number of submissions received in 2014 for Luna. As of March 31, the backlog of IP requests rests at 260. Approximately 36% of that backlog relates to working group requirements, and 22% relates to requirements from projects in the Technology top-level project.

Innovation

We posted 34 new projects proposals in 2014, exactly matching our number for 2013. Reflecting a growth in the project diversity, more than half of the new projects fall under the Technology, Tools, and Eclipse Cloud Development top level projects. This includes ICE and DAWNSci from the Science WG, and three projects restructured out of existing Eclipse projects. The new Eclipse Cloud Development project welcomed three project proposals. The IoT working group brought in six new projects, and LocationTech and PolarSys brought in three new projects each.

The past year saw two new initiatives that will have a significant impact on innovation in the Eclipse community in the coming years.

  • Platform Vision. A core leadership group within the Eclipse IDE community invested a significant amount of time in looking at the future of software development tools, and how the Eclipse platform should direct its investments. They arrived at the following statement:

    Our vision is to build leading desktop and cloud-based development solutions, but more importantly to offer a seamless development experience across them. Our goal is to ensure that developers will have the ability to build, deploy, and manage their assets using the device, location and platform best suited for the job at hand. Eclipse projects, the community, and ecosystem will all continue to invest in and grow desktop Eclipse. Full-function cloud-based developer tools delivered in the browser will emerge and revolutionize software development.

    Continued focus on quality and performance, out-of-the-box experience, Java 9, and first class Maven, Gradle, and JVM Languages support also figure prominently.

  • Eclipse Cloud Development. The mission of the Eclipse Cloud Development top-level project is to create technologies, platforms, and tools necessary to enable the delivery of highly integrated cloud development and cloud developer environments. Our vision is to meet the needs of both the Eclipse tool-building community and its users by providing a comprehensive set of technologies that operate on top of cloud standards, cloud infrastructures (AWS, etc.), and cloud platforms (CloudFoundry, OpenShift, Stratos).

In addition to the Automotive, IoT, LocationTech, openMDM, PolarSys and Science projects noted above, the following projects were proposed at Eclipse over the past year:

  • Egerrit. EGerrit provides a set of Eclipse plug-ins that provide Gerrit code review integration and capabilities in the Eclipse IDE.
  • RDF4J. RDF4J is an RDF (Resource Description Framework) Java toolkit that provides functionality for efficient and scalable storage, querying, and reasoning with RDF data, and a vendor-neutral access API for RDF databases (a.k.a. "triplestores").
  • Buildship. The Eclipse plug-ins for Gradle provides Gradle developer tooling for Eclipse-based IDEs.
  • Package Drone. Package Drone is a software artifact repository where OSGi bundles are first class citizens.
  • openK Platform. The target of the openK Platform is to consolidate Energy and Water Infrastructure Software (EWIS) onto a shared technical platform, to define open interfaces and reduce or optimize interfaces where applicable.
  • Web Modeling Framework. Web Modeling Framework provides a framework to easily develop any online model and diagram editor based on an EMF meta-model.
  • Andmore. The purpose of Andmore is to provide Android Eclipse tooling without having to go through multiple steps.
  • Dirigible. Dirigible provides Integrated Development Environment as a Service (IDEaaS) as well as runtime containers integration for the running applications.
  • Titan. Titan is the TTCN-3-based test toolset widely used within Ericsson, providing Eclipse-based and command line user interfaces, and multi-platform support.
  • Cloud Application Management Framework. The Cloud Application Management Framework can be promoted/adopted by any Cloud-related party as a tool for configuring, deploying and managing applications on different infrastructures in a vendor-neutral manner.
  • Che. Che provides a commercial grade platform for building and managing SAAS developer environments.
  • Eclipse Advanced Scripting Environment (EASE). EASE provides a uniform environment to create, store, modify and execute user generated scripts that run within the Eclipse RCP context.

Luna Simultaneous Release

In June 2014 the Eclipse community shipped Luna, its ninth annual simultaneous release. Including previous releases of the Eclipse Platform, this was the eleventh release that was shipped on time to the day. Seventy six projects participated in the Luna simultaneous release, comprising 61 million lines of code, and produced by 420 committers from 54 member companies.

This predictable release schedule has been a key part of Eclipse's success over the years, and is an important part of the success of the Eclipse ecosystem.






Eight projects joined the simultaneous release in 2014:

  • EMF Client Platform
  • EMFStore
  • Sirius
  • BPMN2 Modeler Project
  • Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN2)
  • Paho
  • QVTd (QVT Declarative)
  • XWT

Three projects dropped off the simultaneous release in 2014:

  • Agent Modeling Platform
  • EclipseLink Project
  • SCA Tools

Committer and Project Community

After nearing the mark for several years, the committer population at Eclipse now exceed 1,200, ending the period at 1,208.




Over the past several years, the Eclipse Foundation has been focusing on reducing barriers to contribution to Eclipse projects. The trend lines clearly show that this effort is bearing fruit, with an increase of almost 200 contributors in 2014.




The EMO is committed to providing steadily improving services to the Eclipse committers and the projects they work on. Here is a sampling of some infrastructure metrics, plus some improvements we've put into place over the past year.

  • Common Build Infrastructure. The CBI infrastructure was significantly expanded again this year. Committers may now self-administer and start/restart their own Hudson instance without webmaster intervention. Also, committers now have a UI to upgrade their instance to a newer Hudson version at their convenience.

    By mid-year, the Mac signing service had failed after sudden policy changes from Apple, but that service was re-engineered and is now stable.

  • New Dashboard. In 2014, we implemented a replacement projects dashboard based on the open source Metrics Grimoire. The new dashboard tracks metrics for Git repositories, reviews via Gerrit, mailing lists, and issues via Bugzilla. Metrics are tracked for the Eclipse, LocationTech, and PolarSys forges. We have declared the old dashboard deprecated and will retire it at the end of 2015.

  • Websites. Almost all of our core web properties received significant graphics and layout refreshes, transforming them into modern and responsive websites that work well on computers and mobile devices. The main www.eclipse.org website, as well as PolarSys, the Project Management Infrastructure and Marketplace are among the updated sites.

  • Servers and Infrastructure. Core service availability (Git, www.eclipse.org, and Bugzilla) for 2014 was 99.993%, our best availability ever. For the first time, our SCM (Git) had a perfect 100% availability for the entire year. We have not recorded a single minute of downtime with Git, planned or unplanned.

    This year was marked with numerous high-profile operating system and service security updates, including OpenSSL, bash and updated cartographic algorithms for SHA.

    After receiving a significant increase in 2013, our bandwidth has returned to a state of saturation during most of the Eastern time zone business day (4h00 to 18h00 Eastern). One of the contributing factors is that more projects are publishing Maven and other artifacts that cannot harness our mirror network.



Back to the top