The Eclipse Foundation stands as a pivotal organization in the open-source software landscape, providing a vendor-neutral, transparent, and collaborative environment for a global community of individuals and organizations. Established in 2004, it evolved from the original Eclipse Project initiated by IBM in 2001. The Foundation's core mission is to act as a steward for the Eclipse community, fostering the growth of open-source projects and cultivating robust business ecosystems around them. Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, the Foundation operates with a legal jurisdiction in the European Union, emphasizing its international and independent nature. It is supported by a vast membership of over 350 organizations, including industry leaders who recognize open source as a critical enabler for their strategic initiatives. This extensive support network solidifies its position as one of the world's largest sponsored collections of open-source projects and developers.
The Eclipse Foundation is renowned for hosting a diverse and extensive portfolio of over 425 open-source projects. While it is perhaps best known for the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE), a dominant platform for Java developers, its scope extends far beyond. The Foundation is home to Jakarta EE, a set of specifications that drive cloud-native Java for the enterprise. Its projects span a wide array of technology domains, including the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud and edge computing, automotive and software-defined vehicles (SDV), systems engineering, artificial intelligence, digital ledger technologies, and open processor designs. Key services provided by the Foundation include rigorous intellectual property (IP) management to ensure commercial viability, ecosystem development to foster collaboration and innovation, and the provision of a scalable IT infrastructure. Through its well-defined development processes and governance models, the Eclipse Foundation ensures the quality, stability, and predictable release of high-quality open-source software, empowering developers and organizations worldwide to build, deploy, and manage software across numerous industries.