The Eclipse community is fortunate to have a large diverse community of organizations that participate as members of the Eclipse Foundation. The annual membership fees these companies pay allow the Foundation to provide services to the the Eclipse community. We at the Foundation also look for new ways to increase the resources we have available to provide these services. Programs like the Friends of Eclipse, Corporate Sponsor program and even adding Google Ad words to some of our pages all help increase the resources available to the Foundation.
In November, the Eclipse Board of Directors agreed to introduce some new marketing programs for the Eclipse ecosystem. These new marketing programs will allow Eclipse member companies to promote their commercial offerings to the Eclipse user community. Companies will be able to purchase for a fee a Promoted Download link on our download page, a Promoted Solution in the Marketplace Client or an advertisement on the eclipse.org home page and download page. The advertisement space will be very similar to the existing Strategic Member advertisement already on these pages. All of these programs will be marked as a ‘Promoted’ item to clearly identify them as being from a commercial organization.
An important mandate of the Eclipse Foundation is to promote a healthy ecosystem of Eclipse value-add solutions. These new marketing programs will allow Eclipse member companies to promote their offerings directly to the Eclipse user community. At the same time, the Foundation will gain revenue to offer services to the greater Eclipse community. Overall it is a win win for Eclipse.
We plan to roll out the programs in the the first quarter of 2011. We will be doing some testing in the next number of days so you might begin to see a promoted download or a promoted solution. If any company is interested in participating in the new marketing programs, please feel free to contact me.
