Today, we are significantly lowering the barriers for companies and individuals to actively invest in the ongoing development of the Eclipse platform. Eclipse has an amazing community of individuals and companies that invest significant amount of resources in the development of Eclipse open source projects. We also have a huge community of users that benefit from Eclipse technology. They use Eclipse tools and technology to build their software products and applications. Most of these users don’t have the time required to participate in an open source project but they do want to see ongoing improvements and investment in Eclipse. We now have a way for these users to invest in Eclipse improvements.
We are pleased to announce the Eclipse Foundation has begun to fund development work on Eclipse projects. In fact, there are a number of features and issues in the Mars release that were funded through the Foundation. The initial focus is on improving the core Eclipse platform, JDT and Web Tools. As the program expands we expect the list of projects will grow too. The process by which funds will be allocated is still a work in progress, but will be made available soon. It will be based on the core principles of openness and transparency.
The funding for the development work will come from individuals and corporate users. Earlier this year, Ericsson provided the Eclipse Foundation funds to improve the Eclipse platform which resulted in SWT, GTK3 and PDE improvements available in the Mars release. Ericsson is a large user of Eclipse and they see the value of investing in ongoing improvements. We hope other large corporate users of Eclipse will follow Ericsson’s lead.
We are also pleased to announce that all users’ donations to our Friends of Eclipse program will be used to fund Eclipse development work. Last year we raised over $120,000 from the Friends of Eclipse program, so we hope the ability to directly fund Eclipse development will significantly increase the donations we gain from our individual user community. To make things even easier, we have added Bitcoin as a payment option. Please take this opportunity to help improve Eclipse by making a donation.
Eclipse open source development will continue to move forward through work of our committer community. Committers are the heart and soul of any open source project. However, we are confident having additional investment from our user community will help accelerate future improvement to Eclipse. If you are a user of Eclipse, individual or corporate, it is now simple to participate in the future of Eclipse.
