Life at Eclipse

Musings on the Eclipse Foundation, the community and the ecosystem

Users can now fund development work on Eclipse

Today, we are significantly lowering the barriers for companies and individuals to actively invest in the ongoing development of the Eclipse platform. Eclipse has an amazing community of individuals and companies that invest significant amount of resources in the development of Eclipse open source projects. We also have a huge community of users that benefit from Eclipse technology. They use Eclipse tools and technology to build their software products and applications. Most of these users don’t have the time required to participate in an open source project but they do want to see ongoing improvements and investment in Eclipse. We now have a way for these users to invest in Eclipse improvements.

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.

We are also pleased to announce that all users’ donations to our Friends of Eclipse program will be used to fund Eclipse development work. Last year we raised over $120,000 from the Friends of Eclipse program, so we hope the ability to directly fund Eclipse development will significantly increase the donations we gain from our individual user community. To make things even easier, we have added Bitcoin as a payment option. Please take this opportunity to help improve Eclipse by making a donation.

Eclipse open source development will continue to move forward through work of our committer community. Committers are the heart and soul of any open source project. However, we are confident having additional investment from our user community will help accelerate future improvement to Eclipse. If you are a user of Eclipse, individual or corporate, it is now simple to participate in the future of Eclipse.

Written by Mike Milinkovich

August 19, 2015 at 11:00 am

Posted in Foundation

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12 Responses

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  1. It would be great if, like BountySource, people could attach funds to a particular ticket (feature or bug). They would be held in escrow and disbursed to the Foundation if the ticket was fixed, or returned to the donator if the ticket wasn’t closed within some period of time. People are willing to give more when they’re getting something that matters to them. It will also generally help align the work with what end users most want by creating incentives to motivate work that is difficult but unsexy—something that’s notoriously difficult in open-source projects.

    Sarah G

    August 19, 2015 at 4:17 pm

  2. Could you add other payment methods such as Visa or Mastercard

    javahacks

    August 20, 2015 at 2:19 am

  3. I do not need to bind my donation on an explicit bug, but i really want to choose fo which project my donation is used. For me one of the most important part of Eclipse with not enough development power is SWT and when i make a donation i want to be sure that SWT (especially the development of new features) gets a boost.

    Ralf M Petter

    August 20, 2015 at 3:12 am

    • We’re not set up for that at the moment, but I can assure you that enhancing SWT is a priority. We did invest in some work to improve it on GTK3 for Mars as one example.

      Mike Milinkovich

      August 21, 2015 at 12:52 pm

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