2014 Annual Eclipse Community Report
Published June 2014
Welcome to the third annual Eclipse Foundation Community Report. Comments and feedback on the style and content would be appreciated at emo@eclipse.org.
Except where noted this report will cover the period April 1, 2013 to March 31, 2014.
Who We Are
Our Bylaws define the Eclipse Foundation in this way:
The Eclipse technology is a vendor-neutral, open development platform supplying frameworks and exemplary, extensible tools (the "Eclipse Platform"). Eclipse Platform tools are exemplary in that they verify the utility of the Eclipse frameworks, illustrate the appropriate use of those frameworks, and support the development and maintenance of the Eclipse Platform itself; Eclipse Platform tools are extensible in that their functionality is accessible via documented programmatic interfaces. The purpose of Eclipse Foundation Inc., (the "Eclipse Foundation"), is to advance the creation, evolution, promotion, and support of the Eclipse Platform and to cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products, capabilities, and services.
This makes the Eclipse community a unique open source community. Not only are we interested in building open source code, we are equally committed to creating a commercially successful ecosystem around that code. This combination of interests has been a key part of Eclipse's success.
In short, our vision for the Eclipse community is
To be the leading community for individuals and organizations to collaborate on commercially-friendly open source software
Strategy
The following are the strategic goals of the Eclipse Foundation for 2014, as set by the Board of Directors.
Be the developer platform of choice: The goal of Eclipse is to define a development platform that is freely licensed and open source, and provides support for the full breadth of the application lifecycle, in many disparate problem domains, and across the development and deployment platforms of choice, including embedded, desktop and the web.
Promote the Eclipse community as the place to collaborate in emerging technology domains: Obviously this is an ambitious goal, as new technology domains and trends are constantly evolving. The Eclipse Foundation staff and leading members of our community work steadily to recruit new projects in emerging technology areas.
Recruit and foster Eclipse projects in those domains: It is an important part of the Foundation's role to be recruiting new projects in areas outside of Eclipse's historical strengths in tools and IDEs. Some recent successes would include the surge in new projects related to the Internet of things (IoT), and location-aware or geospatial technologies.
Create value for all its membership classes: The Eclipse Foundation serves many members whose primary interest is leveraging Eclipse technologies in proprietary offerings such as products and services. The Eclipse Foundation will focus its energies to ensure that commercial opportunity exists within the Eclipse ecosystem. Look for continuous improvements to Eclipse Marketplace, and for other initiatives that benefit members. Committers are also members of the Eclipse Foundation and are in many ways its backbone. The Eclipse Foundation and its staff will continue to look for opportunities to improve services to its project community throughout the year. Look for continuous improvements to our web, download, code management, build, and other key components of project infrastructure in 2014.
Foster growth of our communities and ecosystems: The creation of a large community of commercial and open source organizations that rely on and/or complement Eclipse technology has been a major factor in the success of Eclipse. Each time Eclipse technology is used in the development of a product, service, or application, the Eclipse community is strengthened. Our goal in 2014 is to focus our attention on the creation of working groups and new Eclipse projects that focus on particular industry segments such as the Internet of things, web development, mobile, automotive, insurance, and finance.
Continue to grow a diversified revenue model: Reliance on a single source of revenue to fund the Foundation puts us at greater risk of being negatively impacted by industry specific business cycles. It is a goal of the Eclipse Foundation to ensure revenue sources from multiple types of organizations, and seek other sources such as events and sponsorships.
Some Key Decisions
Over the past year, the Board has made a number of strategic decisions that will impact how Eclipse evolves in the future. A brief summary of these is listed below. More details can be found in the minutes of the Board, found on our website.
Eclipse Foundation Europe GmbH: In October 2013, the Eclipse Foundation Europe was founded. The new EFE has local staff members to support the European community. Staff will support members in EU-funded projects such as ITEA2, provide appropriate development and dissemination services as a project partner, and participate in European-based associations such as the German Bitkom to create awareness of open innovation, open source business models, and the Eclipse platform. Ralph Mueller has been appointed the Managing Director of Eclipse Foundation Europe. Mr. Mueller is a 30-year veteran in the IT industry. He has previously worked at IBM, Object Technology International, and Siemens-Nixdorf; most recently he has been the Director of European Ecosystem at the Eclipse Foundation.
New logo: After almost 14 years, it was time to update our logo to a more modern look.
Along with the new logo comes a new, more restrictive set of guidelines for using the Eclipse logo.
A simplified developer workflow: In 2013 the Eclipse Foundation implemented Contributor License Agreements (CLA) and a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO). It is now very easy for a contributor to create an Eclipse Foundation account and electronically sign a CLA directly through our website. A CLA is tied to an individual's Eclipse Foundation account, which makes it valid for all Eclipse Foundation-managed forges (e.g. eclipse.org, LocationTech, and PolarSys).
The Foundation also created Gerrit plugins and Git hooks that automatically check contributions from non-committers to ensure that the author of the contribution has a valid CLA on file, and that the contribution has been "signed off" by the author indicating that they understand the terms of the Certificate of Origin.
We've also begun supporting GitHub as the main development tool used by projects for their day-to-day development, while maintaining internal mirrors of the GitHub repos. A GitHub hook is used to help guide committers through the CLA and signed-off-by requirements when handling pull requests from the community.
Membership
The Foundation finished 2013 with a total of 190 members. By the end of March 2014, that number had increased to 204. A total of 30 companies joined as new members of the Foundation in 2013 and Q1 2014. These companies include 2lemetry, Alma Mater Studiorum Universita di Bolognal, AMIQ EDA, Analog Devices, Artal Groupe, Azavea, Bitreactive AS, Bonitasoft, Cigital, Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Codetrails, Combitech, Dell, DevelopIntelligence LLC, Docfacto, Euroforum Deutschland SE, Glob3 Mobile, Heinz Nixdorf Institute, IBH Systems, Klocwork, Lablicate, M2M Alliance E.V., MapGears, Marintek, Open Geospatial Consortium, Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL), Robotron Datenbank-Software GmbHSeranata Commerce, Tesis Dynaware, Univeristat Politècnica de València, UT-Battelle, and Vivid Solutions
Working Groups
The recruitment of new projects and members has been greatly assisted by the strategy of creating working groups (WG). As participation in WGs grows, our membership has grown and diversified into different industries such as automotive, aerospace, geospatial, and the Internet of things.
Automotive: With Eclipse Kepler, the Eclipse Automotive working group has shipped a package designed to serve as a platform for automotive tools development. In addition, the group has created the EATOP project, providing tooling for describing automotive architectures in accordance to the EAST/ADL standard. In the work package #5 (Eclipse Qualification Roadmap according to DO-330) a positive result has been delivered (process description and roadmap) and is available for use. Robert Bosch GmbH and Continental AG have teamed up to design and deliver build frameworks that go beyond the current make-based approaches and better serve more complex models. For more information on all these topics, please refer to the Automotive Working Group.
The Eclipse Foundation has (together with other partners) applied as partner for the ITEA project AMALTHEA For Public (pdf). The project has been accepted and is waiting to be provisioned by the national authorities.
Meanwhile, we continue to work with the openMDM group (Open Measurement Data Management) in order to transfer the current openmdm.org into a new working group at the Eclipse Foundation.
Internet of Things (IoT): The Eclipse IoT demonstrated significant momentum in 2013 towards its goal of creating an open source community for the Internet of Things. Of significance was the rename of the working group from M2M to IoT, so that it was more inclusive of the wider IoT industry. In 2013, a total of 10 new open source projects were created at Eclipse that focused on IoT, including
Eclipse SmartHome - provides an integration framework for home automation
Eclipse SCADA - provides a framework for building SCADA solution
Calfornium - an implementation of the CoAP standard
OM2M - an implementation of the OneM2M standard
Wakamma - an implementation of the OMA Lightweight M2M standard
Ponte - provides a bridge between IoT protocols and REST
Kura - provides a set of OSGi services for IoT gateway solutions
Concierge - provides an OSGi R5 complaint runtime for small devices
Mosquitto - an MQTT broker
Krikkit - provides an architecture for to set rules/policies for IoT routers and gateways
At the time of writing, the active members of the IoT working group are 2lementry, BitReactive, Eurotech, ibh Consulting, IBM, and Sierra Wireless.
LocationTech: LocationTech is a working group for developing advanced location aware technologies. In its first year, the LocationTech working group launched and grew to include 10 projects and 13 members. The group participated in 30 events on four continents, including a highly successful six-city LocationTech Tour in which more than 650 people participated.
The group has attracted a strong group of technologies, including
GeoMesa - a scalable spatio-temporal database that provides query capabilities on very large datasets using cloud platforms
GeoTrellis - a high performance geoprocessing engine that enables real time interaction with geospatial data
GeoJinni (formerly SpatialHadoop) - a Hadoop based distributed geoprocessing engine providing OGC data types, functions, and both local and cluster-wide indexing
The JTS Topology Suite - a highly respected library that underpins much of the open source geospatial ecosystem
Spatial4J - provides Geodetic features complementary to JTS
GeoGit - enablles decentralized management of versioned geospatial data and innovative workflows for collaboration
Mobile Map Tools - a framework and library for writing high performance mobile maps applications on Android, iOS, and the Web
Geo Fast Forward (GEOFF) - makes it easy to add maps to Eclipse RCP applications
uDig desktop GIS Suite - provides visualization and processing of data in a wide choice of formats and web services
GeoScript - adds spatial capabilities to dynamic scripting languages including Python, JavaScript, Groovy, and Scala
The founding members of LocationTech include Actuate, Boundless, IBM, Oracle, OSGeo, and Carleton University’s Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre.
New members since the February 2013 launch include Azavea, Glob3 Mobile, Google, MapGears, Mousebird Consulting, Open Geospatial Consortium, and Vivid Solutions.
LocationTech continues to grow and demonstrate increasing momentum.
Long Term Support: After having made good progress on the technology side of the LTS initiative, we were looking into extending the ecosystem for LTS. This resulted in outreach activities at our own conferences as well as external events. We have created a Long Term Support Marketplace within the Eclipse Marketplace that now had eight organizations listed as long term support providers for different projects and platforms. In addition, the LTS steering committee continues to update the LTS home page and is engaging with press to bring the initiative into more conversations. The EMO is actively speaking to potential consumers of long term support (large scale RT applications based on Eclipse RCP, applications and tools in systems engineering, tools, and applications in finance and insurance industry) to create understanding of the value proposition that the LTS ecosystem offers.
PolarSys: The goal of the PolarSys working group is to build and maintain an open source tool chain that is used by organizations building safety-critical and software intensive embedded systems. Industries such as aerospace, defense, transportation, telecommunications, energy, and healthcare require development tool chains with a number of specific requirements, including very long term support and maintenance requirements.
In its second year of activity, PolarSys has grown in terms of membership and projects. Astrium, Artal, Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, and University of Skövde joined the working group. The new projects extended the Polarsys tool chain to new activities in systems engineering and development.
POP - a full environment for Signal, a programing language for critical/real-time embedded applications
CHESS - a Papyrus customization for component based development of high integrity systems
Gendoc - migrated from the Topcased community to provide capabilities to generate documentation from models
ReqCycle - addresses both requirement management and requirement traceability in the tool chain
Kitalpha - a modeling component that implements the ISO/IEC 42010 standard for system description in system and software engineering
PolarSys members participated to two events focused on embedded systems, SAE Aerotech in Montréal and ERTS in Toulouse, They received a lot of interest from the attendees. PolarSys members also published the first videos of PolarSys tools, and the first milestone releases for the PolarSys IDE.
Conferences and Events
The Eclipse Foundation continues to produce very successful EclipseCon conferences. In 2013, we added a third event, EclipseCon France, to our annual calendar. The first edition of EclipseCon France was held in June 2013 and had 246 attendees. The event was an excellent milestone for our growing Eclipse community in France and the aerospace and systems engineering community. EclipseCon Europe continues to grow as our annual European event and has a successful partnership with the OSGi Alliance to co-locate the OSGi Community Event. EclipseCon North America 2013 was located in Boston, MA and provided an excellent opportunity to reach out to the Eclipse community on the east coast of the USA.
The EclipseCon conferences, Eclipse Days, and DemoCamps are the primary events that the Eclipse Foundation supports to help foster the strong personal relationships in the community that only face-to-face contact can create. We highly encourage all Eclipse community members to participate in these events.
Financials
The Eclipse Foundation's fiscal year-end is December 31. Our auditors are the firm Deloitte & Touche, LLP. The Eclipse Foundation is incorporated in the State of Delaware, USA as a 501(c)6 not-for-profit. Its headquarters is located in Ottawa, Canada.
Membership renewals remained strong, working group revenue and website advertising both continued to grow, and an increase in donations was a pleasant surprise. Despite originally budgeting a $0.4M loss, the Eclipse Foundation experienced a gain of $0.1M, and was able to contribute to its cash reserves. The organization continues to be on a solid financial footing.
|
In US $ millions |
2011 |
|
2012 |
|
2013 |
|
Revenue |
4.1 |
|
4.1 |
|
4.5 |
|
Expenses |
4.0 |
|
4.2 |
|
4.4 |
|
Net Income |
0.1 |
|
-0.1 |
|
0.1 |
Intellectual Property Management
During the time period spanning April 1, 2013 to March 31, 2014, the Eclipse Foundation received 941 requests for code reviews, and completed reviews of 849 requests. This represents increases of 2% in review requests and 15% in completed reviews over the previous year. By far, the greatest number of requests for review originate in the Technology top level project, followed by SOA and RT. Requests for review from these top level projects represents 73% of the requests for IP review for the time period. The three projects requiring the greatest degree of IP support were Stardust, followed by Winery and uDig; these represented 25% of the overall requests.
Requests for code review for the Luna Simultaneous Release numbered 25, which represents a 7% decrease from the preceding year. We are no longer experiencing the surge of requests in relation to the Simultaneous Release and requests for review are more evenly distributed throughout the year.
At the time of this writing, the backlog of requests for code review stands at 118. With increased activity by working groups, a higher volume of new project creations, and larger pre-existing open source projects moving to Eclipse, it is expected that we will see a rise in the backlog of requests for code review in the coming year and increases in turnaround time for requests for code reviews.
Innovation
Growth in projects exploded over the past year. More than half of the new projects came to us through the Internet of Things, LocationTech, and PolarSys working groups. Naturally, many of these projects align with the goals of the respective working groups; in addition to these projects, we received proposals representing a diverse set of interests.
Overall,
we received almost three times as many proposals for new projects in
2013 as we received in 2012.
In addition to the Automotive, IoT, LocationTech, and Polarsys projects noted above, these projects were proposed at Eclipse over the past year.
Thym: The HYbrid Mobile project delivers IDE components and a framework for developing Hybrid Mobile Applications on the Eclipse platform. The delivered IDE components support the Apache Cordova framework, but facilitate extensibility to other frameworks including the ones that are not based on Apache Cordova.
Oomph: The Oomph project provides tools that automate the provisioning and management of project-specific IDEs and workspaces, as well as other tediously repetitive tasks.
RCP Testing Tool: The RCP Testing Tool allows developers to create and execute test cases for Eclipse-based applications with minimal effort.
Flux: This project aims at designing and implementing a new architecture and infrastructure for integrating development tools across desktop, browser, and servers. The goal is to provide an extremely flexible platform and infrastructure that allows new cloud-based tooling components to be built highly decoupled from each other and that bridges the gap to existing desktop IDEs at the same time.
UML Generators: The objective of this project is to federate the many different open source code/model generators that are available and that consume or produce UML models.
Handly: The Handly project aims to provide a foundation for construction of language-oriented handle-based models, not unlike the JDT Java Model in their essential qualities.
CBI: The Common Build Infrastructure (CBI) project maintains and develops software production technology common to multiple Eclipse projects.
Franca: The Franca project provides a technology- and platform-neutral IDL, including an easy-to-use editor based on the Eclipse IDE.
Gendoc: Gendoc generates documentation for EMF models using document templates in formats such as OpenOffice Writer (.odt) or Microsoft Word (.docx).
Mbeddr: The project addresses the development and evolution of mbeddr language extensions (standalone DSLs and C extensions), their IDE, debuggers, and the integration of formal verification tools.
Winery: Winery is a Web-based environment to graphically model TOSCA topologies and plans that manage these topologies.
Ogee: The main goal of Ogee project is to provide tools for developers who want to consume and produce data using the OData protocol.
Fundamental Modeling Concepts (FMC): Fundamental Modeling Concepts (FMC) is a modeling language for complex and dynamic systems. The project will provide meta models and editors for FMC diagrams.
Kepler Simultaneous Release
In June 2013 the Eclipse community shipped Kepler, its eighth annual simultaneous release. Including previous releases of the Eclipse Platform, this was the tenth release that was shipped on time to the day. Seventy-one projects participated in the Kepler simultaneous release, comprising 58 million lines of code. Over 180K downloads were recorded for Kepler packages in the first three days. This predictable release schedule has been a key part of Eclipse's success over the years, and is an important part of the success of the Eclipse ecosystem.
These projects joined the simultaneous release in 2013:
EMF Diff/Merge
Sphinx
Stardust
Maven Integration for Web Tools Platform
An equal number of projects dropped off the simultaneous release in 2013:
Jetty (servlet engine and http server)
Virgo
Eclipse Runtime Packaging Project
Xtend*
*Note that Xtend merged with Xtext (which does take part in the simultaneous release).
Committer and Project Community
The EMO is committed to providing steadily improving services to the Eclipse Committers and the projects they work on. Here is a sampling of some infrastructure metrics, plus some improvements we've put into place over the past year.
Common Build Infrastructure: The Common Build Infrastructure (CBI) was significantly expanded to allow projects to have their own Hudson instance. The Hudson Instance Per Project (HIPP) allows committers to leverage the Hudson CI system for end-to-end building, testing, build promotion, and code repository tagging, while improving overall build system stability, availability, and performance. Committers are now empowered to administer their CI system as well as to start, stop, and restart the process without webmaster intervention should it crash or hang.
Plans are to support other OS platforms for HIPP, such as Fedora, Ubuntu, Mac, and Windows, to help support platform-specific builds and tests.
Project Management Infrastructure: In late 2012, the Eclipse Foundation completed the initial release of a new effort to replace the existing project management infrastructure – which includes the Developer Portal – with a new unified infrastructure with the intent of making project management activities more consistent and generally easier for all involved. The initial release was rolled out for Eclipse Projects and LocationTech in early 2013.
We've continued to make improvements and enhance the functionality. We rolled it out for PolarSys. In 2014, we plan to improve the overall look and feel and usability, and move the remaining project-management related functionality (the committer management functionality in particular).
Sonar: Sonar is an open-source product which is used to gather metrics about code quality, put them all in a single dashboard, and provide some tips to help improve quality. The Eclipse Foundation deployed Sonar as a supported service for its projects in 2013.
Servers and Infrastructure: Core service availability (Git, www.eclipse.org, and Bugzilla) for 2013 was 99.975%, with an all-time high of 99.985% in 2010. Most of our downtime was caused by bandwidth DDoS attacks against other clients at our co-location facility. We did not experience unexpected hardware or software failures in 2013 for our core services. For 2014, we are considering adding the Marketplace website to our core services. Gerrit is currently not considered a core service since we cannot currently provide hardware redundancy due to its single-server architecture. The Gerrit team has iterated its desire to implement such scalability and fault tolerance in the near future.