As has already been reported by eWeek, InfoWorld and Linux Watch the Eclipse Foundation is going through the process of joining three different standards organizations: the Java Community Process (JCP), the Object Management Group (OMG) and the OSGi Alliance.
I guess that we should be flattered that Eclipse is newsworthy enough that the articles broke before we even issued the press release. 
Our motivations are pretty well documented in the eWeek article. I largely view this as part of Eclipse maturing and playing a more active part in the broader community. Many projects at Eclipse rely on standards from JCP, OMG and OSGi and we believe its simply good behaviour to contribute back by joining. Whether we have the resources available to actively participate will take some time to sort out. But if any committer is interested in representing Eclipse in an expert group, please let us know.
The longstanding relationships with these groups should be well-known by observers of Eclipse, but here are a few examples.
- The Eclipse Web Tools Project (WTP) alone provides tooling and implementations of JSR 244 (JEE 5), JSR 220 (EJB3), JSR 127 (JSF) and others.
- Equinox and OSGi have a very tight relationship, with regular interactions between the expert groups there and committers working on code in Equinox.
- The Eclipse Modeling Project provides implementations for OMG’s UML2, OCL and other specifications
Some of the other organizations we’re working towards joining include the like of ObjectWeb, who has been a member of the Eclipse Foundation since day one. We’ve also been participating in the OpenAjax Alliance for quite a while as well, and I’m honored to say that I was elected to its steering committee.
There are some who are going to view this story through the lense of the historically frosty relationship with Sun, and try to colour this as somehow controversial. But I really don’t see any basis for controversy here. Sun has always acknowledged that Eclipse is part of the larger Java ecosystem, and we’ve always used JCP specifications. It’s simply time to recognize that.
