Eclipse Foundation Moving to Donations to Support Open Source Projects

For many years, the Eclipse Foundation has had a profound impact on the open source arena. To this day, each summer, the Foundation serves up its annual "release train" of open source technologies, and this summer's train included Docker tools and Java IDE improvements.

Now, in a seminal moment for the Eclipse Foundation, the decision has been made to fund its open source projects through donations. Here are the details.

Until now, development of Eclipse projects came from individuals and organizations freely contributing time.  "Today, we are significantly lowering the barriers for companies and individuals to actively invest in the ongoing development of the Eclipse platform," notes an Eclipse post. "Eclipse has an amazing community of individuals and companies that invest significant amount of resources in the development of Eclipse open source projects."

The post also notes the following:

"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."

 All users’ donations to the Friends of Eclipse program will be used to fund Eclipse development work. Last year Eclipse raised over $120,000 from the program. To make donations easier, Eclipse has added Bitcoin as a payment option.

 Are you interested in donating? If so, you can find details here.