Mike Milinkovich's blog

I am very excited and proud to introduce the new top-level Eclipse Enterprise for Java (EE4J) project. For those that might not have heard, Oracle has announced their intention to move Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation. Creating the EE4J top-level project is the first step to making this a reality.

Oracle announced today that they, along with IBM and Red Hat, will be moving Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation. I would like to welcome everyone involved to our community. We look forward to working with all of the participants in the Java EE ecosystem as it moves to a more open and collaborative development model.

There was lots of news in the land of Java yesterday. If you have not already seen the posts by Mark Reinhold and Donald Smith of Oracle, I encourage you to read:

The Eclipse Foundation is in the process of revising the Eclipse Public License (EPL). Refreshing a popular open source license is a big job, and one that we have been chipping away at for over a year.

As promised in my last post, today we are rolling out the new Eclipse Contributor Agreement (ECA). As I mentioned earlier, if you already have an active Eclipse CLA, you don’t have to do anything….your CLA remains active and you can convert to the new agreement when it expires after three years.

In addition to overhauling our IP processes, next week the Eclipse Foundation will be updating our contributor agreements. The changes we’ll be making include:

At our recent face-to-face Board meeting earlier this month, an agreement in principle was made to move ahead with the largest overhaul of our intellectual property processes since the inception of the Eclipse Foundation 12 years ago. Now, don’t get too excited because months of work are going to be required before the new policies are approved, and the implementation of new processes are completed.

Two weeks ago at EclipseCon, the Eclipse Che project announced its 4.0 release. This announcement is the first major result from the Eclipse Cloud Development strategy we announced eighteen months ago.

Yesterday I talked about three interesting new runtime projects which have joined the Eclipse community, and made the point that we are extending our reach beyond our “…original comfort zone of tools…”. But that doesn’t mean that we are not seriously investing in tools. In fact, in 2016 the Eclipse Foundation itself is hiring new staff to do exactly that.

Yesterday was quietly one of the biggest days ever for Eclipse. That is because of three new project proposals that went live. It’s certainly unusual for us to have three new projects at once, but I’m not sure if it’s unprecedented. However, I am really excited about these projects, and what they mean for the future of the Eclipse community.