Eclipse Names Founding Board of Directors

Board Expands to 12 Members as "Committer" and "Add-In Provider" Representatives are Elected

ASHEVILLE, NC-March 3, 2004-Four new members of the Eclipse Board of Directors, representing the organization's Open Source project community and commercial supporters, were announced today. Newly elected, Todd Williams (Genuitec, LLC), John Wiegand (Eclipse Project Lead, IBM); Rich Main (SAS), and Bjorn Freeman-Benson (University of Washington) join the board, which already includes Ronald Ingman (Ericsson), Michael J. Rank (Hewlett Packard), Dave Thomson (IBM), Jonathan Khazam (Intel), Jim Ready (MontaVista Software), Dan Dodge (QNX Software Systems Ltd.), Michael Bechauf (SAP AG) and Boris Kapitanski (Serena Software). This establishes the founding twelve-member Eclipse Board of Directors, responsible for approving Eclipse strategy, development roadmaps and release plans, and establishing organization policy.

"Genuitec is very pleased to be able to continue our strategic involvement with the Eclipse Foundation," said Todd Williams, vice president of technology for Genuitec. Through our membership in the Board of Directors, we will work to expand the Eclipse ecosystem in its current market segments (integrated development environment users, add-in providers and rich client platform adopters) while fostering its adoption in additional market segments."

Bjorn Freeman-Benson said, "I'm honored to have been elected by the committers as one of their two representatives on the Board. I look forward to working with the rest of the Board to expand the Eclipse community by encouraging low-overhead ways for people to contribute."

"The rapid and broad adoption of Eclipse technology is proof to a very strong market demand for open standards and common platforms worldwide," said Jim Ready, chief executive officer and president, MontaVista Software. "I am honored to serve on the Eclipse Board of Directors. MontaVista Software has proudly demonstrated our commitment to Eclipse, by adopting it as a strategic development framework, through its founding membership in Eclipse, and with ongoing contributions to Eclipse technology. We continue to look forward to being part of this important initiative."

"I look forward to serving on the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors," said Rich Main, director of Java development environments at SAS. "SAS is committed to working with the Eclipse community to strengthen the growth and adoption of Eclipse. This will be a critical year for the Eclipse Foundation as we strive to move from an organization that is focused primarily on the development community to one that is an increasingly attractive option for end-user consumers, as well. We intend to work in partnership with the entire Eclipse community to make this transition as smooth and successful as possible."

Originally a consortium that formed when IBM released the Eclipse Platform into Open Source, Eclipse has now been incorporated as an independent, not-for-profit organization. Tangible support from 58 member companies enables Eclipse to host and nurture 19 Open Source projects that originated in commercial and academic contexts. In just 2 years, this community has professionally delivered the most broadly deployed and fastest growing universal tools integration platform in history. All technology and source code provided within this fast-growing ecosystem remains openly available and royalty-free.

Worldwide, Eclipse membership represents individual contributors and large and small companies with interests ranging from embedded computing and Linux through traditional enterprise class information technology.

"With constitution of our founding Board of Directors, Eclipse is now traveling on the industry-neutral path that is critical for integration technology," said Skip McGaughey, spokesperson for Eclipse. "This launches the most significant step forward in the evolution of Eclipse as an organization. For the Open Source development community we're establishing a support base that will strengthen the projects and expand a powerful reusable architecture. For commercial and academic users of Eclipse technology, this means a more open management process and improved choices in a stable and reliable environment."

About Eclipse

A vibrant open eco-system has formed around royalty-free Eclipse technology, a universal platform for tools integration. Eclipse based tools give developers freedom of choice in a multi-language, multi-platform, multi-vendor environment. Eclipse provides an award winning plug-in based framework that makes it easier to create, integrate and utilize software tools, saving time and money. By collaborating and exploiting core integration technology, tool producers can leverage platform reuse and concentrate on core competencies to create new development technology. The Eclipse Platform is written in the Java language and comes with extensive plug-in construction toolkits and examples. It has already been deployed on a range of development workstations including Linux, QNX, Mac OS X and Windows-based systems. Release distribution downloads, a full description of the Eclipse community and white papers documenting the design and use of the Eclipse Platform are available at http://www.eclipse.org.

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