2021 Annual Community Report | The Eclipse Foundation

Welcome to the tenth annual Eclipse Foundation Community Report. Comments and feedback on the style and content would be appreciated at emo@eclipse.org.
Except where otherwise noted this report covers the period April 1, 2020 to March 31, 2021.
Executive Director’s Summary:A Transformative Year
Welcome to the 2021 Eclipse Foundation Community Report!
I’ve had the pleasure of serving the Eclipse community as Executive Director since its inception in 2004. Over that time, the changes to the open source community at large, the Eclipse community in particular, and the Foundation itself have been extraordinary. I am thrilled to have had the opportunity to see the growth and evolution of the Eclipse community over my 17 years with the Eclipse Foundation.
2020-21 has been a transformative year in almost every aspect.
Certainly, the global pandemic has had a dramatic impact on the Foundation as well as all of our 300+ member organizations and our thousands of committers and contributors. First and foremost, I extend my best wishes to all, and hope that all in our community, and their families, have been, and continue to be safe. Also, the pandemic has brought to a very quick halt the opportunity for us to meet one another at various conferences, meetings, and events. After this long hiatus from travel, I look forward to seeing our community members again in the not-too-distant future.
Important Project Milestones Achieved
I am proud of the major accomplishments achieved by our community over the 2020-21 period. Many of our most visible projects have seen important milestones. Notably, the Simultaneous Release of the Eclipse IDE and packages continues to evolve; since switching to a cadence of quarterly releases in 2018, 12 quarterly releases of the Simultaneous Release have been completed on schedule, and with enhanced features benefitting the IDE’s millions of users. Jakarta EE 9 was released in December 2020, representing a significant milestone for the enterprise Java ecosystem. Eclipse SUMO has emerged as the most active Eclipse Foundation open source project. There were also major releases in our IoT and edge communities, our cloud tools community, and many other technical areas.
In total, 515 project releases were completed over the past 12 months. As of March 2021, the Foundation has stewardship of over 260 million lines of code in the Eclipse repositories. The Eclipse Foundation codebase is conservatively valued at over $13 billion using the industry standard COCOMO model.
We have also seen the Eclipse Foundation Specification Process (EFSP) being used more widely. In addition to Jakarta EE, it is now adopted by the MicroProfile, Sparkplug, and AsciiDoc specification projects. Further validation of the EFSP came from the migration of OSGi specifications from being overseen by the OSGi Alliance to now being housed at Eclipse Foundation and using the EFSP.
Working Groups Continue to Thrive
Working groups continue to play a growing role in how members engage at the Eclipse Foundation. In total, we have 17 working groups as of March 31, 2021. As a proof point of the importance of these working groups in bringing members together to work collaboratively in support of Eclipse Foundation projects, more than 140 Member organizations now participate in one or more working groups. These working groups are enabling new initiatives to flourish.
To call out just two new working groups formed in early 2021, the Adoptium Working Group has been formed as the successor to AdoptOpenJDK, and will play a valuable role in the Java ecosystem going forward. The Eclipse IDE Working Group has been formed to augment the incredible work done by our Committers on the Eclipse IDE and the Simultaneous Release, and to ensure the long-term vibrancy of the IDE.
New Initiatives at the Foundation
Lastly with respect to our technical initiatives, many of the activities emanating from Eclipse Foundation projects and working groups are leading to significant, innovative services being hosted at the Foundation as their vendor neutral home. For example, the OpenVSX Registry is hosted by the Eclipse Cloud Development Tools Working Group, and provides a marketplace for VS Code extensions that is operated in a vendor neutral, transparent manner. The Jakarta EE Compatible Products site provides a comprehensive landing area for industry and is seeing widespread use. As open source continues to grow in significance in the marketplace, the opportunity for the Foundation to provide innovative services through our working groups will continue to increase in value.
Eclipse Foundation as a European-based Association
For the Foundation and our members, a big part of our year has been in redomiciling the Foundation as a European-based, international nonprofit association incorporated in Belgium. This shift reflects and capitalizes on our unique position as the preeminent European-based open source community with global reach. This pivot of our corporate structure has been a major lift in terms of both effort and positive impact — and one that we see as being beneficial to all our projects and members over the coming years.
In particular, I want to call out the members of the Eclipse Foundation Board for the many dedicated hours they put into this initiative, as well as the organizations who led this initiative, be it with financial, legal, or community outreach support. This redomiciling has been a unique project, one of which I’m proud and from which I have certainly enjoyed the learning journey. More details about the redomiciling are available here.
In conjunction with redomiciling, the Board and Membership at Large approved updates to the Eclipse Bylaws in the fall of 2020. These changes better align the Foundation with European-based not-for-profit practices, as well as streamline our membership structure. Of note, we now have four classes of membership (vs. the six we had previously), where the predominance of our corporate members a