Credit: IBM
Today, the Eclipse Foundation announced that they are moving their headquarters from the U.S. to Brussels, Belgium. As a founding member of the new Eclipse Foundation AISBL nonprofit association, IBM believes this move to Europe will accelerate global collaboration around open source projects and pave the way for richer technology as a result of Europe’s rigorous privacy and security standards.
The Eclipse Foundation has a proven historical record for being a fair, secure place to collaborate in the open. With more than 170 members and over 900 committers based in Europe, it’s fair to say that European open source developers are already invested in the Eclipse Foundation projects, so moving its headquarters makes sense to continue to support this growth.
Europe’s embrace of open standards and open source
As their policies show, open standards and open source are important to the European community. Europe’s legal and commonly accepted requirements around privacy and security of individuals and organizations, extended to open source technology, will make that technology stronger for all users.
The EU Rolling Plan for ICT Standardisation details standardisation actions that can help companies comply with technical regulation and EU policy objectives related to innovation and industrial policy. Additionally, open source is part of the strategic directions of the European Commission as well as of many of the EU Member States and other European countries.
As a European-based organisation and with its excellent track record, the Eclipse Foundation will bring open source developers and policy makers together to drive future technology developments.
Eclipse Foundation in Europe
A close alignment of open standards and open source software will spur software development in the coming decades. Specifications will define agreed-upon standards for creating software, and the open source development model will accelerate innovation.
The Eclipse Foundation provides an option for all working groups to bring open source software up to the status of a specification. As a global leader in the convergence of open standards and open source, the Eclipse Foundation has established the Eclipse Foundation Specification Process(EFSP), which offers a general framework and governance model for developing specifications in open source.
Developers in Europe are already working with Eclipse Foundation projects, so moving its headquarters will be a boon to those projects and others. Examples of active communities in Europe include:
- Eclipse Paho and Eclipse Mosquitto are IoT projects that center around implementations of the standard MQTT. This technology, created by IBM’s Hursley lab, is developed as a global standard in the standards body OASIS and is an ISO norm (ISO/IEC 20922).
- The Eclipse Arrowhead project provides systems and services that anyone can use to design, implement and deploy an Arrowhead-compliant System of Systems.
- Eclipse Ditto is a framework for providing the “Digital Twin” pattern for IoT applications to interact with IoT devices. Essentially, Ditto mirrors physical devices as digital representations in the cloud. You can use various APIs, including HTTP and WebSocket API, to interact with the devices and you can integrate with other systems via AMQP, MQTT and Apache Kafka.
IBM’s role with the Eclipse Foundation
IBM has a long history with the Eclipse Foundation, leading its creation in 2004 and seeding the Eclipse project with a significant code contribution, dedicated developers, and legal help in writing the licenses. With a vibrant developer community and active research and development labs in Europe, IBMers are already involved in many of the highest-profile open source projects today, collaborating with developers and engineers around the globe to create safe, innovative technology.
We believe that the Eclipse Foundation’s strong core of developers, deep understanding of open source and open governance, and healthy European ecosystem will cause the community, the projects, and open source in general to flourish in Europe.
Join us
Check out a list of Eclipse’s projects, find a project that suits your interests and skills, and join the innovation.
Credit: IBM
