2020 Annual Community Report | The Eclipse Foundation

Welcome to the ninth 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, 2019 to March 31, 2020.
Our Executive Director’s Summary:An Incredible Year, and The Road Ahead
Welcome to the 2020 Eclipse Foundation Community Report - I hope you find it insightful!
I’ve had the pleasure of overseeing the production of this annual Community Report since it was first introduced in 2012. The Foundation has seen many, many changes over the years, and the past 12 months are certainly no exception. Through this report, our staff highlights many of the accomplishments of our community, and that list is significant!
Many of our major projects have seen important milestones, including the Simultaneous Release with the Eclipse IDE and packages continuing to evolve with quarterly releases, Jakarta EE 8 being released in September 2019, and new releases in many of our IoT projects. In total, 485 project releases were done over the past 12 months. As of March 2020, the Foundation has stewardship of over 240 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.
On the “what’s new” front, we have seen a plethora of new projects, members, and working groups - all of which mean the Foundation continues to evolve as a dynamic, diverse community. For example, the Foundation stood up five new working groups in Q1-2020 alone, each of which represents a significant new initiative by members, and collectively, represents a major push by the Foundation into new and exciting new technical areas. To highlight just a few of these new working groups and their areas of interest:
Details regarding the activities of all our working groups are described in the working group section of this report.
Also, in the “new” category, Eclipse Foundation is pleased to welcome 29 (and counting) new members who joined in 2020 as part of their participation in the OpenHardware Group, a new open source not-for-profit organization dedicated to fostering collaboration among global hardware and software designers in the development of open source cores, related IP, tools, and software. Through this “dual membership” model, OpenHardware is leveraging the Eclipse Foundation’s governance framework and project infrastructure, which is yet another way Eclipse is engaging with the ever-evolving open source community.
Of particular importance, the Foundation continues to make a major investment in marketing and messaging on behalf of, and along with, its members and working groups. A continued focus on driving awareness of our technologies through press releases, surveys, white papers, and more is increasing the awareness of our many initiatives.
Like all businesses, the Foundation has been impacted directly by the Covid-19 pandemic. While this pandemic began in Q1 of 2020, and so is not reflected directly in this report in any significant way, the pandemic will pervade everything the Foundation does in the upcoming year. At this point, we have seen the activity in most of our community continue to thrive. But even though advancing our technology is exciting, we know the health, safety, and well being of our community members, and their families, is what matters most. To that end, we have taken strides to protect our staff through the pandemic, and will continue to do so for as long as it takes. We are grateful for the understanding of our community as we do so.
To enable us to continue to evolve, I am very pleased to report the Foundation also made major changes to our overall governance structure. Of note, the Board and our Members approved the most significant changes to our Bylaws since our inception. These changes were driven by a desire to have the Bylaws reflect the Foundation’s broad and welcoming approach to supporting its vision of being the leading community for individuals and organizations to collaborate on commercially-friendly open source. The full list of changes is on our website, but I wish to highlight that our Purpose is now to “provide vendor-neutral, open development of open source technologies, specifications, platforms, runtimes, frameworks, and tools.” This change makes clear that Eclipse is a “big tent” of open source technologies, and we continue to engage with both our existing and new projects.
And last but definitely not least, I’m pleased to report that the Board took the dramatic step of adopting and approving our new International Strategy. While the details of this strategy can be found in our recent announcement, I’m pleased to highlight that at the core of this strategy is the news that we are redomiciling the Foundation as a European-based organization, based in Brussels. Eclipse Foundation AISBL will be uniquely positioned to leverage our international growth to foster global industry collaboration on strategic open source projects in various technology domains, such as the cloud, edge computing, artificial intelligence, connected vehicles, telecommunications, and the Internet of Things.
As always, we welcome your comments and feedback. Let us know your thoughts at emo@eclipse.org or on Twitter @EclipseFdn.
The Eclipse Foundation’s mission is summarized as follows:
The Eclipse Foundation’s purpose is to advance our open source software projects and to cultivate their communities and business ecosystems.
The dedication to this purpose makes the Eclipse community a unique open source community. That is, Eclipse’s ongoing success comes from this unique combination of a consistent interest in building open source code and community, and a sustained commitment to creating a commercially successful ecosystem around that code.
In short, our vision for the Eclipse community is this:
To be the leading community for individuals and organizations to collaborate on