Today, we announced the Eclipse Foundation is establishing itself as a European-based organization. By creating the Eclipse Foundation AISBL, an international non-profit association based in Brussels, we will be in the ideal position to foster global industry collaboration in strategic open source technologies, including cloud, edge computing, IoT, artificial intelligence, connected vehicles, telecommunications, and many more.
Our transition to Europe, which we expect to be legally finalized by July, will help us build on our recent international growth. European and global leaders such as Bosch, the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Fraunhofer FOKUS, Fujitsu, Huawei, IBM, Intel, IOTA Foundation, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, and more than 300 other technology innovators have invested in open source collaboration at the Eclipse Foundation to sharpen their competitive edge.
In the first quarter of 2020 alone, the Eclipse Foundation added nearly 40 new member companies, five new working groups, and received 11 new project proposals.
Open Source Collaboration Has High Strategic Value in Europe
The Foundation’s growth in Europe has been particularly significant as increasing numbers of businesses, researchers, academics, and government organizations on the continent realize that industrial open source collaboration is the fastest and easiest way to innovate around complex technologies in a way that enables sustainable value creation.
European policy makers and industry representatives have also recognized the need to pool their strengths to achieve goals that individual organizations cannot achieve on their own and to compete more effectively in international markets. The European Commission considers open source initiatives to be strategically important to shaping Europe’s digital future and offers resources to help European organizations understand how they can leverage open source as a business advantage.
With 170 member organizations and more than 900 committers in Europe, the Eclipse Foundation is the largest open source organization in Europe. We also have an international reach and an established reputation for enabling well-governed open source software communities that provide a level playing field for all ecosystem members.
Together, these factors made it an easy decision to focus more resources on this critical geography while we continue to support and expand our membership and our communities globally.
Eclipse Foundation Projects Target European and Global Technology Priorities
The Eclipse Foundation currently hosts a number of projects that align with Europe’s — and the world’s — technology priorities. Here are a few examples:
· Eclipse Kuksa unifies vehicle, IoT, cloud, and security technologies across the complete tooling stack for the connected vehicle domain to enable a standardized approach to Vehicle-To-Cloud (V2C) scenarios across all vehicles.
· Eclipse Che is a Kubernetes-native IDE that makes it much faster and easier to develop enterprise applications that leverage containers and Kubernetes.
· Eclipse Theia is a true open source alternative to Microsoft Visual Studio (VS) Code that gives organizations and developers a single, modern technology stack to build customized IDEs for desktops and browsers.
· Eclipse Deeplearning4j takes deep learning and AI applications out of the theoretical, academic world and into the real world where they can be applied in useful and meaningful ways across industries.
· Eclipse fog05 is a fog computing platform that provides a decentralized infrastructure for distributing compute, storage, control, and networking functions closer to users along a cloud-to-edge continuum.
· Jakarta EE brings developers the modern enterprise Java technologies needed to develop, deploy, and manage server-side and cloud native applications.
· Eclipse Capella provides an open source solution for model-based systems engineering (MBSE).
· Eclipse IoT Packages develops fully integrated packages that demonstrate how two or more Eclipse IoT projects can be used together to deliver particular functionality or address a particular challenge.
Get More Information
If you’re reading this blog, there’s a very good chance you’re already very familiar with the benefits of open source collaboration at the Eclipse Foundation. If that’s not the case, you can learn more about the benefits of membership here.
If you would like more insight into the Eclipse Foundation’s role at the center of European open source innovation, read our new white paper Enabling Digital Transformation in Europe Through Global Open Source Collaboration.
