The Eclipse SDV Working Group’s progress is reflected not only in the growing number of member companies and projects, but also in the community’s deepening engagement, as confirmed by recent analysis spanning the last two years of Eclipse SDV’s activity within the EU-funded FEDERATE initiative.
Founded in 2022, the Eclipse SDV Working Group is bringing together engineers, researchers, start-ups, and global OEMs to collaborate on something greater than any single organisation could achieve alone.
Within this automotive open source community, every contribution goes beyond code. Each step is helping to shape the future of mobility. Our recently presented 2025 community metrics update tells a story of growth, collaboration, and the power of shared innovation. It highlights remarkable progress across engagement, development activity, and project adoption, demonstrating the strength of open collaboration in shaping the future of SDVs.
Our analysis, conducted for the 2025 “Report and statistics on stakeholder participation in OS SW projects” under the umbrella of the FEDERATE project, compares year 2 and year 3 of the Eclipse SDV Working Group (March 2023 - March 2024 & March 2024 - March 2025), covering over 90% of the projects within the FEDERATE Building Block collection.
Engagement as a measure of community health
In open source, engagement is far more than downloads or stars on GitHub. It’s about people raising issues, improving documentation, joining community discussions, reviewing pull requests, and mentoring others.
Over the past two years, more developers have stepped into active roles. Every new contributor who asks a question or submits a fix is proof that our community is both healthy and welcoming. Just as importantly, the number of returning contributors shows that people are staying because they believe in the mission. The following insights provide a holistic view of both technical development and community health.
Key engagement metrics and insights
The analysis adopted a balanced set of metrics, capturing quantitative activity and qualitative community health:
- Issues: User engagement has surged, with open and closed issues growing nearly 79% year-over-year, reflecting more problem-solving, feature requests, and team responsiveness.
- Repositories increased by 55.6%, suggesting a broader base for project components (slide 5).
- Commits: Development activity remains strong, with commits increasing 51.8% (from 9,819 to 14,906 in total numbers). This points to sustained technical progress and community momentum (slide 6).
- Pull requests (PRs) rose 86.8%, a clear indicator of collaborative growth and codebase evolution (slide 7). PRs present proposals for changes to the codebase.
- Contributors: Unique contributors increased by 28.1%, coupled with a 55.7% increase in commits and a 26.5% increase in repositories. This underscores a thriving developer ecosystem (slide 8).
- Forks: Repository forks on GitHub are steadily climbing, reflecting both adoption and experimentation across the ecosystem. For instance, the eclipse-ecal/ecal repo grew from ~150 forks to more than 186 (slide 9). Forks are a more active indicator of engagement than GitHub stars, reflecting an intent to work with the codebase (e.g., for contribution, experimentation, or private use).
Together, these numbers tell a compelling story of a vibrant and expanding Eclipse SDV open source community.
Surging adoption of Eclipse SDV projects
Some of our projects are becoming true cornerstones of the SDV ecosystem:
- Eclipse Kuksa, now underpinning nearly half of FEDERATE’s SDV building blocks, saw activity double after integration with HAL4SDV. Behind that figure are dozens of engineers ensuring vehicles can exchange data securely and seamlessly.
- Eclipse Cyclone DDS, a real-time communication framework, supports over half of all cloud-related building blocks. The community here has worked tirelessly to cut pull request review times from five days to just two – a real victory for collaboration and responsiveness.
- Eclipse iceoryx has attracted more than 30 new contributors since its adoption by SHIFT2SDV for middleware. It highlights how essential open, safety-focused middleware is becoming in the automotive world.
Let’s not forget that behind each of these projects there are developers across the globe working across time zones, collaborating late into the night, and pushing the boundaries of what open source SDV technology can achieve!
FEDERATE and synergies with other initiatives
Funded by the European Union, the FEDERATE initiative has been one of the most transformative parts of the Eclipse SDV journey, and vice versa. Of FEDERATE’s shared building blocks repository, 94% are hosted by the Eclipse Foundation.
Before FEDERATE, collaboration across projects was slower and often fragmented. Now, thanks to shared repositories and alignment with HAL4SDV and SHIFT2SDV, new developers are onboarding 60% faster.
This is what happens when European funding meets community energy: barriers fall, ideas move more swiftly, and the path from research productive code shortens. What has emerged in Europe over the last few years is not competition between individual initiatives, but valuable synergies within a larger SDV community, an ecosystem that is more than the sum of its parts – continuously growing, evolving, adapting, and learning.
A healthy, resilient ecosystem
Healthy communities are about balance. At the Eclipse SDV Working Group, we’ve seen significant technical contributions, but we’ve also invested in community resilience and technological sustainability by:
- Welcoming both newcomers and long-standing contributors.
- Ensuring transparency in decision-making.
- Supporting developer well-being, to prevent burnout.
- Maintaining robust infrastructure and financial backing to keep projects running smoothly.
This commitment to community health ensures that our progress isn’t just rapid, but also sustainable for the long journey ahead.
Why this matters
The bigger picture? Open collaboration is proving to be the quickest route to innovation in automotive. More and more, open source building blocks from Eclipse SDV are making their way into vehicles and systems that will define the next decade of mobility.
Every fork, every merged pull request, every new contributor represents a step towards a future where cars are not just hardware, but also software platforms: safer, smarter, and open.
Looking ahead
The story of the Eclipse SDV community and ecosystem is one of momentum and growth. We’re growing, learning, and proving that shared innovation works. But the most exciting chapters are yet to come.
If you’re an engineer, researcher, or company wondering how to get involved, now is the time. When it comes to the future of SDVs, the road is open, and we’re building it together.
Innovation moves fastest when it moves together. Join us on this journey!
