Long before the cloud era, the Eclipse Foundation quietly served as the backbone of open source stewardship. Its software, frameworks, processes and infrastructure helped define and standardise developer workflows that are now core to modern engineering practices.
As early as 2005, the Eclipse IDE’s modular plugin architecture embodied what we now recognise as today's extension registry model. Developers no longer needed to manually download and configure artifacts; they could be automatically ingested, at high volume, into build and delivery pipelines known today as CI/CD.
Eclipse Foundation’s early success demanded infrastructure that could scale globally without the benefit of GitHub, Cloudflare, AWS, or GCP. Like many pioneering platforms of that time, we had to build performant and resilient systems from the ground up.
Fast forward two decades, and open source infrastructure has become the backbone of software delivery across every industry. Developer platforms now span continents and power everything from national infrastructure to consumer technology. In this landscape, software delivery is no longer just a technical process but a key driver of innovation, competition, and developer velocity.
Today, the Eclipse Foundation continues its legacy of building dependable open source infrastructure, powering registries, frameworks, and delivery systems that enable millions of developers to innovate at scale. From open registries like Open VSX to entreprise-grade frameworks such as Jakarta EE, the Foundation provides the scaffolding for the next generation of AI-augmented development. Its vendor-neutral governance ensures that tools, and the innovations they enable, remain open, globally accessible and community-driven.
From IDEs to extension registries, the Eclipse Foundation continues to shape the digital backbone of modern innovation. It remains one of the world’s most trusted homes for open collaboration, enabling developers, communities, and organisations to build the technologies that define the future—at global scale.
