Welcome to the fifth 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, 2015 to March 31, 2016.
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.
The following are the strategic goals of the Eclipse Foundation for 2015, 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 welcomed two new strategic members to the Board of Directors in 2015, and another two in the first quarter of 2016. Both RedHat and CEA List joined the board last year, as noted in last year’s annual report. In January 2016, Robert Bosch GmBH increased its membership level from Solutions to Strategic Developer, and leads the Eclipse Vorto, Hawkbit and Hono projects. In February, 2016, Ericsson also increased its membership level from Solutions to Strategic Developer, and leads the Eclipse eGerrit, Titan and Trace Compass projects.
The Foundation finished 2015 with a total of 246 members. By the end of April 2016, that number had increased to 250. A total of 36 companies joined as new members of the Foundation from second quarter of 2015 through April 2016, including: Adocus AB, Ancit Consulting, ASAM eV, Azul Systems Inc, Bachmann electronics GmbH, b-data GmbH, CartoDB, Compex Systemhaus GmbH, Develop BASYS GmbH, Ecole Technologie Superieure, EfficiOS Inc., Flanders Make vzw, Flex Alert Company, GE Digital, Huawei, IncQuery Labs Research and Dev Ltd, iSencia Belgium NV, itema As, Microsoft, NorCom IT AG, NumberFour AG, One Fact Inc, Open Analytics NV, O’Reilly, Queen’s University at Kingston, SAAB AB, Sencha, SensorUp Inc, The Goldman Sachs Group, The Radiant Group, TM Forum, Typefox, Verisign Sarl, vogella GmbH, XDEV Software Corp, Zend Technologies and Zolertia SL.
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: The Eclipse Automotive Working Group has been dormant for the last year, with the exception of the Amalthea4Public research project and the related APP4MC Eclipse project. In February Continental AG disengaged with the group. We have discussed the state of the group with some of the remaining players: By the middle of 2016 we shall publish a plan for continuation or dissolve the working group.
Internet of Things (IoT): The Eclipse IoT Working Group continued to gain momentum in 2015 towards its goal of creating an open source community for IoT. The community has grown to 21 open source projects, 2 million lines of code, 150 developers making contributions and 28 member organizations participating in the Working Group.
The new projects in the IoT community include:
The membership of the IoT working group grew to 28 members, including IBM, Eurotech, Sierra Wireless, Azul Systems, Bosch, Canonical, CA Technologies, Huawei, Red Hat, itemis, SMB, openHab, Opentext Analytics, Siemens, Verisign, Cisco, IS2T, Deutsche Telekom, ibh Systems, bitreactive, M2M Alliance, DC Square, Gadget Keeper, MicroEJ, Litmus Automation, Generative Software, Solair, Zolertia and LAAS-CNRS.
In 2015, the IoT WG organized a number of community outreach programs, including:
LocationTech, hosted by the Eclipse Foundation, is a working group developing technologies with spatial awareness. LocationTech continued to grow, and upon celebrating its 3rd birthday has grown to 20 members and 18 projects.
Strategic members of the LocationTech working group include: Boundless, IBM, Oracle, Google Red Hat
Participant members include: Azavea, CartoDB, CCRi, Glob3 Mobile, MapGears, Mousebird Consulting, OGC, Ordnance Survey, Planet Labs, RadiantBlue, SensorUp, and VividSolutions
New members in the past year were: CartoDB, RadiantBlue, Red Hat, SensorUp, and Planet Labs.
LocationTech has become well known for the community of “big geo” technology projects including GeoTrellis, GeoMesa, GeoJinni, and GeoWave. The GeoBench and SFCurve projects, new this year, provide complementary capabilities for benchmarking and creation/transformation/ and querying space filling curves. Important libraries such as JTS and Spatial4J made progress on their incubation, with JTS doing much work to re-license from LGPL to BSD+EPL.
The GeoMesa project and Spatial4J projects were the first ever projects to do releases at LocationTech. GeoMesa released version 1. 2.0, and Spatial4J released version 0.6.
LocationTech projects participated in Google Summer of Code and Facebook Open Academy (FOA) again this year. The FOA program has been an especially useful source of talented & motivated students.
The Eclipse Foundation organized FOSS4G North America 2016 on behalf of LocationTech & OSGeo. The conference was a huge success, drawing more than 400 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 2015, hosted in Washington D.C.. This event hadn’t been held for a few years, so its return was viewed positively by many. The event was hosted at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, and featured an excellent program balancing speakers from government and industry.
The 3rd annual LocationTech Tour was a big success. There were 10 events globally with over 1,000 people participating. The number of events and people was slightly lower than the previous year, as staff time to help support events maxed out due to the group’s rapid growth. There are plans to hire in 2016 to enable further growth.
Science Working Group (SWG), hosted by Eclipse, works to solve the problems of making science software interoperable and interchangeable. It was founded in June 2014 and is now in it’s second year of operation. It has now grown to 15 members and 8 projects.
The group has the following members:
New members this year include: Airbus, Open Analytics
The Science Working Group hosts the following projects:
In its second year the following projects joined the working group:
The group participated in a number of events including for the first time, Science tracks at EclipseCon France, Europe & North America. The number of presentations has grown steadily from five in France, six in Europe and a jump to 12 in EclipseCon North America.
A full day meetup was hosted by MARINTEK in August 2015. Much of the discussion was focussed on establishing a foundation for the group’s software. This has resulted in the January project proposal.
The steering committee decided to elect a chair and a secretary to help with running the group, and a set of job descriptions was established for these roles. Jay Jay Billings of Oak Ridge National Laboratory was elected chair and Torkild U. Resheim of Itema was elected secretary. Both will serve for a period of one year, until the next election.
The Eclipse Long-Term-Support Working Group reports slow progress. No new members have been joining the group, and with EclipseSource/Innoopract the group has lost one of its founding members. The LTS infrastructure is now successfully used by some organizations, the signing infrastructure for LTS builds is in place. Reports about successful support contract deals have been mentioned by group members, but details have not been disclosed to the public. For 2016 we expect new members to join the group.
openMDM The Eclipse openMDM (measured data management) Working Group has made reasonable progress in the past year. Membership was growing as expected when ASAM e.V., Siemens, Tata Motors, Norcom IT and itemis joined the group. Technical work is progressing. The group expects to provide the first technology demonstrator in the 3rd quarter of 2016.
PolarSys The PolarSys Working Group made significant progress with a focus on marketing the PolarSys solutions, increasing PolarSys visibility and the creation of the first Industry Consortium dedicated to Papyrus.
The PolarSys Working Group created datasheets for each PolarSys solutions to promote them as industry-grade, ready to deploy, extensible tools. In 2016, PolarSys will focus on the creation of case studies that document the deployment of PolarSys solutions by end-users. In 2015, PolarSys introduced EGit/EGerrit as a new solution in PolarSys portfolio to support configuration management.
The PolarSys Working Group participated to several international events to increase PolarSys visibility: Embedded World Conference 2015 and 2016, the Incose Symposium 2016 in Seattle with a large booth and demonstrations of the Capella and Papyrus solutions, and Models 2015 in Ottawa.
In terms of membership, the Polarsys Working Group has 24 members. Leading industry players are Airbus (including civil aircraft, defence and space and Helicopter divisions), CEA LIST, Ericsson, Thales and SAAB. Participating members are Adocus, Artal Group, Atos, Combitech, ESI Group, Flanders Make, Fraunhofer Fokus, Obeo, One Fact, Soyatec, Tecnalia and Zeligsoft. And Guest members are Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Ecole de Technologie Superieure de Montreal, Queen’s University, TM Forum, and University of Skovde.
The most important event of last year is the creation of the Papyrus Industry Consortium (Papyrus IC) as a sub group of PolarSys that brought 5 new members to the Working Group. The Papyrus IC gathers a group of members companies interested in financing and guiding the development of products based on the open-source Eclipse Papyrus project. Those end-users companies collaborate with service providers, and researchers to create a complete customizable and extensible industrial-grade open source Model Based Engineering (MBE) tool suite for companies developing software-based systems, from Enterprise Software to Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS).
The Papyrus IC is led by Airbus Helicopter, CEA LIST, EclipseSource, Ericsson, OneFact, SAAB and Zeligsoft. They collaborate with Adocus, Airbus Defence and Space, Atos, Combitech, Flanders Make, Fraunhofer Fokus and a number of universities.
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 2015 and had 267 attendees. Based on the success from the previous year, the conference continued with the model of a full day of Unconference where many of the Foundation’s Working Groups met, followed by two days of main conference activities.
EclipseCon Europe celebrated its tenth anniversary in November, 2015, with 600 people in attendance. This event was co-located with the OSGi Community event, and included a great collection of technical sessions, BoFs, keynotes, including a great talk by Sabine Hauert on Swarming Nanomedicine, a return of the IoT Playground, as well as many social activities. The conference also hosted a number of dedicated events, including the IoT Summit, the Papyrus Summit, Project Quality Day and LocationTech Day. Feedback from the conference from both attendees and sponsors remains strong year over year.
In March, 2016, EclipseCon North America returned to the Reston, VA area, where the conference was previously held in March, 2012. This year’s event saw a return to EclipseCon NA being stand-alone, as opposed to the joint event with FOSS4G in 2015, and with a return to the number and quality of tracks seen at traditionally offered at EclipseCon NA. The conference also hosted the IoT Summit, a CDT Summit and a LocationTech code sprint. Feedback from the conference’s 277 attendees was very positive overall, with many noting the quality of the talks and the interaction within the community being very strong. However, there was also general feedback from both attendees and sponsors of a need to make changes to the conference in order to attract new people into the event.
For the 2nd consecutive year, the Eclipse Foundation and LocationTech acted as host and organizer for FOSS4G NA, held this year in Raleigh, NC in May, 2016. The conference saw another significant increase in attendance, growing from last year’s 430 to 558 this year. Like EclipseCon North America, the number of tracks and speakers were increased year over year, with very positive feedback being received. 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.
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. Despite originally budgeting
a $0.4M loss, the Eclipse Foundation controlled expenses to result in a breakeven year. The organization continues to be on a solid financial
footing.
Looking forward to 2016, the Board has approved a budget forecasting a $0.5M loss, and a significant growth in headcount.
In US $ millions
2013
2014
2015
2016 Budget
Revenue
4.5
4.3
4.9
5.5
Expenses
4.4
4.7
4.0
6.0
Net Income
0.1
-0.4
0.0
(0.5)
During the time period spanning April 1, 2015 to March 31, 2016, the Eclipse Foundation received 1,563 requests for code review and completed 1,321 reviews. As more Projects come on board,
the need for code review continues to grow, particularly for the Eclipse Foundation’s working groups. In March 2016, the backlog of IP review requests reached an all-time high of 331 edging
out the previous 2015 high of 307.
The Eclipse Foundation is currently in the process of hiring another analyst to address this growing demand.
In 2015, we posted twenty-six new project proposals across our three forges. This is down from the thirty-four that we posted in the previous year. The proposals span an impressive range of technology, from cloud development tools, Internet of Things, programming languages, and more.
The Eclipse Plug-ins for Cloud Foundry project enables developers to deploy and test their applications on Cloud Foundry without leaving their Eclipse integrated development environment. The introduction of this project pulls the Eclipse IDE into our cloud development story, joining the Eclipse Che, Eclipse Dirigible, and Eclipse Orion projects (which was moved into the Eclipse Cloud Development top-level project in 2015).
We are pushing towards the critical mass required to create a Science top-level project as a complement to the working group. In 2015, we created several projects, including Eclipse Rich Beans, Eclipse Advanced Visualization, and Eclipse Triquetrum which all join the Eclipse DawnSci, Eclipse Integrated Computational Environment, and others in the Technology top-level project.
The Eclipse Buildship project provides tools for the popular Gradle build technology in the Eclipse IDE. Eclipse Collections is a set of highly-efficient object and primitive data structures for Java (e.g. List, Set, Bag, Multimap, BiMap, Stack), and Eclipse Golo is a dynamically-typed programming language for the Java Virtual Machine which supports imperative and functional programming patterns.
In addition to the projects noted above, the following projects were proposed at Eclipse in 2015:
In June 2015 the Eclipse community shipped Mars, its tenth annual simultaneous release. Including previous releases of the Eclipse Platform, this was the twelfth release that was shipped on time to the day. Seventy nine projects participated in the Mars simultaneous release, comprising 65 million lines of code, and produced by 380 committers from 50 member companies.
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.
Seven projects joined the Mars Simultaneous release: Eclipse SWTBot, Eclipse RCP Testing Tool, Eclipse e(fx)clipse, Eclipse Thym, Eclipse Trace Compass, Eclipse Oomph, and Eclipse Lua Development Tools (LDT). Four projects that had participated in the previous releases dropped out: Eclipse Mylyn Intent, Eclipse Model Focusing Tools, Eclipse Paho, and Eclipse Koneki. The Eclipse Buildship project, which provides Eclipse Platform tools for working with Gradle-based builds, joined the first update of the Mars release in September 2015, and is not included in the chart.
Since 2013, the Foundation increased its collaboration with academics, researchers and industries by participating to several European projects. The Foundation main objective on such projects is to help the consortium in dissemination and in building an Open Source community around the EU project.
The positive side effects are in:
Today the Eclipse Foundation Europe is a partner in 3 large European research projects:
Our number of committers grew past 1,400 in 2015. Curiously, however, while all of our other numbers are increasing (the number of active projects increased by 5%, and the total number of commits increased by 13%), the number active committers dropped by about 4% (lower than 2014, but still higher than 2013).
Our focus on removing barriers for contributions continues to reap dividends as the number of non-committer contributors increased by approximately 35% over the previous year. The Eclipse Platform project and its subprojects have become great examples of diversity; their project teams are clear leaders in accepting contributions, accounting for 885 contributions from approximately 122 contributors in 2015. Several other projects boast impressive contribution numbers as well, with Eclipse SmartHome, Eclipse C/C++ Development Tools, and Eclipse Papyrus taking top spots.
Many of the contributors have been invited to join project teams as committers.
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.
