Eclipse Foundation Broadens Participation Options for Community Members
Ottawa, Canada - February 23, 2010 - To broaden participation in the Eclipse community, the Eclipse Foundation is introducing two new initiatives to encourage both large corporations and small technology companies to participate in the Eclipse community. Eclipse is a global community that benefits organizations of all types: small/large, ISVs, consultants, enterprise IT, tech companies, services providers, universities, non-profit, etc. However, the support of the Eclipse Foundation is mainly funded through the membership dues of tech companies, such as ISVs, hardware vendors and services providers. These new initiative will broaden the participation options for both large corporations and small technology companies.
The Eclipse Corporate Sponsor Program encourages large corporate users of Eclipse technology to contribute back to the community. Many large companies use Eclipse technology internally but for a variety of reasons can not easily contribute back to the community in terms of committers or membership. The Corporate Donor program allows these companies to financially sponsor the Eclipse Foundation and thus support the services the Foundation provides to the overall community. The Corporate Sponsor Program will recognize three tiers of sponsors: 1) Platinum Sponsor for sponsorship of more than $100K USD, 2) Gold Sponsor for sponsorship of more than $25K USD and 3) Silver Sponsor for sponsorship of more than $5K USD. Companies that have already joined the program include Cisco, Amazon Web Services, IBM and Novell.
The Eclipse Foundation has also extended the membership criteria to make it easier for small technology companies to join as members of the Foundation. The Eclipse Board has approved a $1,500 USD Solutions Membership Dues for organizations with annual corporate revenues less than $1 million USD and not more than ten employees or contractors on staff. Previously, the lowest membership option available was $5,000 USD. Companies that have already taken advantage of this change and joined the Eclipse Foundation include Modular Mind and ANCiT Consulting.
About the Eclipse Foundation
Eclipse is an open source community, whose projects are focused on building an open
development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building,
deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. A large, vibrant ecosystem of major
technology vendors, innovative start-ups, universities and research institutions and
individuals extend, complement and support the Eclipse Platform.
The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit, member supported corporation that hosts the Eclipse projects. Full details of Eclipse and the Eclipse Foundation are available at www.eclipse.org.