Welcome to the sixth 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, 2016 to March 31, 2017.
The Eclipse Foundation’s mission:
The purpose of Eclipse Foundation is to advance the creation, evolution, promotion, and support of its hosted technology projects, and to cultivate diverse open source communities, and vibrant business ecosystems 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 and community, but 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 technology.
The following are the strategic goals of the Eclipse Foundation for 2017, as set by the Board of Directors.
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.
The Eclipse Foundation has eleven (11) strategic members, including CA Technologies, CEA List, Codenvy, Ericsson, IBM, itemis AG, Obeo, Oracle, Red Hat, Robert Bosch GmBH, and SAP.
Of note, the Eclipse Foundation also counts close to 1400 committers as members. Committers are an important membership class for the Foundation, as represented by the Board seats granted to them.
The Foundation finished 2016 with 260 member companies. By the end of April 2017, that number increased to 262 member companies. A total of 36 new companies joined as new members of the Foundation from May 1, 2016 through April 30, 2017, including
Associacao de Usuarios da Tecnologia Java SouJava, Booz Allen Hamilton, Bridging IT GmbH,CMind Inc, Create-Net, DePaul University, Deutches Zentrum, Docker Inc, Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science, Warsaw University of Technology, fortiss GmbH, InterSystems Corp, Iotracks Inc., IRISA, ITK Engineering AG, L'Embarque, London Java Community, Mãelardalen, Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), OFFIS e.V, openHAB Foundation, Payara, Professional Science Masters GIS Temple University, PTA GmbH, RepreZen, SalesForce.com, Inc., Samsung Semiconductor Inc, Sherpa, SMT.Kumudben Darbar College of Commerce, Science and Management Studies, Splendit IT-Consulting GmbH, SSI Schaefer IT Solutions GmbH, Synchrotron Soleil, Telecom Saint-Etienne, Terranodo, LLC, Universitat Oberta Catalunya, University of Gothenburg, Webtide.
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.
Internet of Things (IoT) The Eclipse IoT Working Group is a community of organizations and individuals building open source technology that is used to build IoT solutions. Eclipse IoT has 29 different open source projects and 32 members of the working group. The technology portfolio include technology for embedded constrained devices, IoT gateways, and IoT cloud platforms.
A number of new projects joined the Eclipse IoT community in the past year, including
The Eclipse IoT Working Group also undertakes a number of community outreach and development programs, including the following:
LocationTech, hosted by the Eclipse Foundation, is a working group developing technologies with spatial awareness. Now in its fourth year, LocationTech continued to grow and mature, and now includes 19 members and 16 projects. During the past 12 months, a number of major milestones were achieved, including significant releases by a number of projects.
Strategic members of the LocationTech working group include Boundless, IBM, Oracle, and Red Hat. Participant solutions members include: Azavea, Booz Allen, Boundless, CartoDB, CCRi, OGC, Planet, RadiantBlue, SensorUp, Terranado, and VividSolutions.
New members in the past year include Booz Allen, Terranado, DePaul University, and Temple University.
Of note, GeoTrellis, GeoGig, SFCurve and Spatial4j, all key projects that were contributed to LocationTech in previous years, completed their incubation and released their initial version under the Eclipse process. The GeoMesa project had its second major release in 2016.
The fourth annual LocationTech Tour was a big success. There were 15 events globally, with over 1,500 people participating.
The Eclipse Foundation organized FOSS4G North America 2016 on behalf of LocationTech and OSGeo. The conference was a huge success, drawing more than 550 people. For the first time at a FOSS4G event of this size, the program featured 30% women speakers, and attendance was 30% women.
LocationTech organized FedGeoDay 2016, hosted in Washington D.C. This was the second year in a row for this event, and featured an excellent program with tracks dedicated both to government and industry speakers. The event was hosted by the American Red Cross, and was well attended.
The Science Working Group (SWG), hosted by the Eclipse Foundation, works to solve the problems of making science software interoperable and interchangeable. It was founded in June 2014 and is now in it’s third year of operation. It has grown to 15 members and 10 projects. This report covers the period from March 2016 to March 2017.
The group has the following members:
New members this year include Soleil Synchrotron.
MARINTEK was merged into a new organization in January 2017 and is no longer a member.
The Science Working Group hosts the following projects:
In its third year the following projects joined the working group:
The group hosted an Unconference at EclipseCon France in June 2016. There were four talks for the Science track at the conference.
In order to facilitate and encourage cooperation between the various science related projects, a new top level project; Science, was created in October 2016. This hosts most of the Science Working Group’s projects.
Also in October 2016, the group coordinated a common release for some of its projects. The aim was to make the working group more visible and ensure that some of the projects depending on each other were synchronized. A joint press statement was released by the Eclipse Foundation and Oak Ridge National Labs on the topic of the release.
In October 2016, the group ran a full day workshop as part of the NOBUGS 2016 conference held in Denmark. The workshop featured talks and tutorials on a number of Eclipse projects (EASE, January, RichBeans, Scanning, DAWNSci) and was well attended by users from many synchrotron and other scientific facilities.
There were two talks in the Science and LocationTech track at EclipseCon Europe in October 2016, plus a very popular science related keynote – ’Observation of Gravitational Waves from Binary Black Hole Mergers - Dawn of a New Astronomy.’ The group also participated in the Unconference prior to the conference.
In November 2016 the group was the focus of the Eclipse Newsletter, which featured five stories about the group’s projects.
There were two science related presentations by group members at Eclipse Converge in San Jose in March 2017.
The steering committee continued to elect a chair and a secretary to help with running the group. Tracy Miranda was elected chair and Torkild Ulvøy Resheim was re-elected secretary. Both will serve for a period of one year, until the next election. We would like to thank Jay Jay Billings of Oak Ridge National Labs for his excellent service as the previous chair.
We would also like to thank Andrea Ross for her service helping the working group since its inauguration. Mike Milinkovich is now the Eclipse Foundation liaison for the group.
The Eclipse Long-Term-Support Working Group continues to see slow but steady growth. In the last 12 months, Robert Bosch Gmbh has joined the working group as a steering committee member. The related Eclipse infrastructure appears to be sufficient at this point in time. Due to the departure of IBM’s Pat Huff, the chair position was transferred to Lisa Lasher (IBM).Website: https://lts.eclipse.org
The Eclipse openMDM (measured data management) working group wants to foster and support an open and innovative ecosystem providing tools and systems, qualification kits, and adapters for standardized and vendor independent management of measurement data in accordance with the ASAM ODS standard.
In the past 12 months, the openMDM group has focused on building its first demonstrators and revising the existing code base. The projects are now in a state where the code base can be downloaded from the Eclipse mdmbl project and installed in a restricted way due to some infrastructure prerequisites.
Mr. Sven Wittig from Audi has succeeded the former chair of the working group, Gerwin Matthwig. He has helped to initiate the hiring of a product manager (Toolkit Manager) for the group as well as a standing development team funded by the working group. The current plan is to issue a 1.0 release in the fall of 2017.
New member Bridging IT GmbH joined the working group in the spring of 2017.
The PolarSys Working Group focuses on providing open source development solutions for Software and Systems Engineering. It has 28 members and 14 projects hosted on the PolarSys forge. New members in the period include TM Forum, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Sherpa Engineering, and CMind Inc.
In 2016, PolarSys members worked together to refine the WG vision and mission statements and to improve the WG governance with emphasis on an end-user orientation. The central change is to extend the scope of the WG to Software Engineering, and to define the focus of PolarSys on product management of end-user solutions.
During the past 12 months, PolarSys members continued to improve the PolarSys established solutions (Capella and Papyrus) with a focus on product management and usability. PolarSys sponsored exhibit booths at the Incose Symposium, Models 2016, and EclipseCon Europe 2016 in order to promote these solutions.
Several new projects enriched the PolarSys ecosystem: Polarsys B612, the open source font designed for readability; PolarSys NG661 to design and simulate ARINC661 Human Machine Interfaces; the PolarSys Rover to put together educational resources related to PolarSys solutions; and PolarSys Time4Sys, a tool to capture timing aspects in the design phase of a real-time system.
This period was also the first year of operation of the Papyrus Industry Consortium, a PolarSys hosted industry consortium (IC) of 14 members dedicated to the advancement of the Papyrus ecosystem. The Papyrus IC sponsored exhibit booths at different conferences including the annual conference of Incose canadian chapter and Models 2016 and had a central place at the Ericsson Modeling Days 2016. All the committees of the Papyrus IC were active this year including the Steering Committee, the Architecture Committee, the Product Management Committee, and the Research Committee. This greatly helped build the collaborative ecosystem around Papyrus. Product Management activity resulted in the creation of Papyrus for Information Modeling, a customized tool streamlined for users interested in modeling the static structure of information with UML class diagrams. Product Management activity also resulted in a good description of the Papyrus Industry consortium Product Line. Lastly, the research consortium coordinated 14 webinars covering both research and industry topics.
With the success of the Papyrus Industry Consortium, PolarSys members are now creating the Capella Industry Consortium to foster the development of the Capella ecosystem. This Capella Industry Consortium will start operating in the next period and we expect new members to join in this context.
At the beginning of 2017, the PolarSys Steering Committee was re-elected, since Ericsson withdrew from the leadership of both PolarSys and the Papyrus Industry Consortium. Existing user members quickly stepped in to take the responsibilities of PolarSys chair (Benoît Langlois from Thales) and Papyrus IC chair (Xavier Plavis from Airbus). In addition, leading suppliers Charles Rivet from Zeligsoft and Etienne Juliot from Obeo lead the marketing activities and the technical consistency of PolarSys solutions respectively.
The Eclipse openPASS Working Group was initiated in August 2017 by three German car manufacturers: BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen.
The rise of advanced driver assistance systems and partially automated driving functions leads to the need of virtual simulation to assess these systems and their effects. This especially refers, but is not limited, to safety effects in traffic. There are various methods and tools for prospective evaluation of safety systems with respect to traffic safety. Implementing the methodology by creating and maintaining the SIM@openPASS platform will support reliability and transparency of results obtained by simulation. The growing number, complexity, and variety of those vehicle functions make simulation an essential part in research, development, testing, public rating, and homologation and is thus, directly or indirectly, required by all stakeholders in vehicle safety, including manufacturers, suppliers, insurance companies, legislators, consumer advocates, academia.
The Eclipse openPASS working group is the driving force behind related development of core frameworks and modules. The Eclipse openPASS WG endeavors to make sure that openPASS related Eclipse projects are in line with external important developments. The goal is a broad availability of different modules.
Work on the related Eclipse simopenpass project started immediately after the creation of the working group and was mostly executed by the fourth founding member, the Munich based company ITK Engineering GmbH. While there are still issues with the existing code base, the car manufacturers have started installing and using the code base.
For the future we expect code consolidation and growth of the related ecosystem.
Automotive. The Eclipse Automotive Working Group is now officially defunct. OpenMDM and OpenPASS are the new Eclipse Working Groups in the Automotive domain with more focused activities. Other working groups will be added in the future.
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 one or more of these events.
EclipseCon France was held in June 2016 and had 245 attendees. The conference was extended by an extra day, with three full days of conference sessions. The Unconference, always well attended at EclipseCon France, was held after the main sessions for the first time this year. The feedback from attendees was very positive, including feedback regarding both keynotes – the first by Thomas Guenoux, founder of CommitStrip, who gave a very entertaining and engaging ’Explaining Code to my Mom,’ and the second by Johan Stokking on the initiative he is leading to build an open source crowd-sourced IoT network.
EclipseCon Europe celebrated its eleventh anniversary in October 2016, with 618 people in attendance, the largest audience yet. This event was co-located with the OSGi Community Event, and included a great collection of technical sessions, BoFs, the IoT Playground, and a gripping talk by Stephen Carver illustrating the problems that led to the space shuttle disasters and the critical importance of communication and leadership in large scale projects. The conference also hosted a number of dedicated events, including the IoT Day, the CDT Summit, and Project Quality Day. Feedback from the conference from both attendees and sponsors continues to be very strong, with many stating this was the best EclipseCon conference yet.
In March 2017, the Foundation hosted and organized Devoxx US. Devoxx is a well known vendor neutral conference series based in Europe, and Devoxx US was the first introduction of the Devoxx brand and format to North America. In conjunction with Devoxx US, the Foundation also held a one-day Eclipse Converge conference, which was run as a smaller EclipseCon event. An Eclipse IoT Day was held concurrently with Eclipse Converge, as was DevRelConf, a half-day developer relations conference. Collectively, the events had a very strong technical content covering a broad range of topics, including both more traditional EclipseCon-type material as well as a significant number of speakers well known in the Devoxx community. Collectively, 661 attendees participated in the events. Feedback from the attendees was generally positive overall, with many noting the quality of the talks and the many exhibitors. There was general feedback from both attendees and sponsors that the lower than expected number of attendees had a negative impact on the overall experience.
As noted in last year’s annual report and included here for completeness, the Eclipse Foundation and LocationTech acted as host and organizer for FOSS4G NA, held in Raleigh, NC in May, 2016. The conference attendance grew from 430 in 2015 to 558 in 2016, and feedback was generally very positive. The conference included a poster and map session, a PostgreS Day, and a two-day code sprint. Approximately 30% of the attendees were women, which is more than double the historical proportion for FOSS4G conference. FOSS4G NA will next be held again in 2018, and will again be organized by Eclipse Foundation and LocationTech.
In addition to the conferences noted, the Foundation grew its 2016 Eclipse DemoCamps series to 19 cities across 9 countries, which is an increase of 18% over 2015. These events are led by the community, and serve as a great way to introduce Eclipse technologies to new users.
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, and
working group revenue and website advertising both continued to
grow. The organization continues to be on a solid financial footing.
Looking forward to 2017, the Board has approved a budget forecasting a $0.5M loss, and a significant growth in headcount.
| In US $ millions | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 Budget | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | 4.3 | 4.9 | 5.4 | 6.3 | |
| Expenses | 4.7 | 4.0 | 5.6 | 6.8 | |
| Net Income | (0.4) | 0.0 | (0.2) | (0.5) |
During the time period spanning April 1, 2016 to March 31, 2017, the Eclipse Foundation received 1,933 requests for intellectual property review and completed 1,894 reviews. As more open source projects come on board, the need for code review continues to grow, particularly for the Eclipse Foundation’s working groups. In early 2017, the backlog of open IP review requests dipped briefly below the 100 mark; as of April 2017, however, the backlog of IP review requests is 165 (about half of what we had at the same time last year).
The Eclipse Intellectual Property Policy was updated in 2016 to include two types of IP Due Diligence for the third-party software used by open source projects hosted by the Eclipse Foundation. Type A Due Diligence involves a license certification only and Type B Due Diligence provides our traditional license certification, provenance check, and code scan for various sorts of anomalies. Prior to this change, project teams would have to wait until the full application of what we now call Due Diligence was complete before issuing a release. Now, a project team can opt to push out a Type A release after having all of their third-party libraries license certified.
All new projects start using Type A due diligence, but a project team can decide what level of IP Due Diligence they require for each release. Hypothetically, a project team could opt to make several Type A releases followed by a Type B release, and then switch back.
We’ve solicited a few existing projects to try out the new IP Due Diligence type and have already approved more than 100 third-party libraries as Type A.
As of the end of March 2017, we have twenty five projects designated as Type A (all new projects are being designated as such). As we move forward, we expect that all new projects will employ Type A Due Diligence for all incubation releases and then decide whether or not to switch to Type B (license certification, provenance check, and code scan) for their graduation. There is, of course, no specific requirement to switch at graduation or ever, but we’re going to encourage project teams to defer the decision of whether or not to switch from Type A until that point.
The Eclipse IoT and Technology Top Level Project accounts for more half of the intellectual property reviews initiated between April 1, 2016 and March 31, 2017. This aligns well with the rates of new project creation in those Top Level Projects (approximately 60% of all new projects created in in that time frame were created under Eclipse Technology and Eclipse IoT).
As the primary incubator for new projects, it’s natural that the Eclipse Technology Top Level Project is the leading source of requests for intellectual property review. The Eclipse Open Standard Business Platform project stands out as the high consumer of intellectual property resources from the Eclipse Technology Project. The rapid growth of the IoT project space translates into high individual project representation in the ’top-ten’ consumers of intellectual property resources, including Eclipse Kapua, Eclipse hawkBit, Eclipse Hono, Eclipse Kura, and Eclipse SmartHome. There was also very high intellectual property activity for new projects and new activity in the Eclipse Cloud Development (primarily from the Eclipse Che project), and LocationTech Top Level Projects.
In June 2016 the Eclipse community shipped Neon, its eleventh annual simultaneous release. Including previous releases of the Eclipse Platform, this was the thirteenth release that was shipped on time, to the day. Eighty-four projects participated in the Neon simultaneous release The release comprises 69 million lines of code produced by 326 committers from 46 member companies, with contributions from 461 non-committer contributors.
Eight projects joined the simultaneous release: Eclipse VIATRA, Eclipse PMF, Eclipse EclEmma, Eclipse USS SDK, Eclipse LSP4J, Eclipse LSP4E, and Eclipse Triquetrum. The Eclipse EMF Validation, Query, and Transaction projects all merged into a single Eclipse EMF Services project, and the Eclipse GMF Notation project merged into the Eclipse GMF Runtime project. The project teams from Eclipse Riena, Eclipse Thym, Eclipse Andmore, Eclipse Gyrex Project, and Eclipse GMF Tooling decided to drop out of the simultaneous release.
This predictable release schedule has been a key part of the Eclipse Community's success over the years, and is an important part of the success of the Eclipse ecosystem.
In 2016, the Eclipse Foundation created the Science Top Level Project with the following projects:
In addition to the projects noted above, the following projects were proposed at the Eclipse Foundation in 2016:
Foundation increased its collaboration with academics, researchers, and industries by participating in several European projects. The Foundation’s main objective in these projects is to help the consortium build an Open Source platform and community around the EU project.
The positive side effects are
Today the Eclipse Foundation Europe is a partner in seven large European research projects:
Eclipse also created a research consortium named GEMOC. This open and international initiative aims to coordinate and disseminate the research results regarding the support of the coordinated use of various modeling languages that will lead to the concept of the globalization of modeling languages.
Our number of committers grew past 1,400 in early 2017.
The EMO is committed to providing a robust and dependable server and software infrastructure, including professional support staff to assist projects and working groups in achieving their goals effectively and efficiently, as well as 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.