Eclipse Foundation
The Eclipse Foundation empowers a global community with a mature, scalable, and business-friendly environment that drives open source collaboration and innovation, providing vendor-neutral governance for open source projects.
Founding Story
The Eclipse Project was originally created by IBM in November 2001 and supported by a consortium of software vendors. The Eclipse Foundation was formally established on February 2, 2004, to create a vendor-neutral, open, and transparent community environment. The goal was to establish an independent steward for the Eclipse community that would provide intellectual property (IP) management, ecosystem development, and IT infrastructure. In 2020, the foundation moved its legal jurisdiction to the European Union, becoming a Belgian AISBL to better serve its global community.
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Leadership
Founders
Eclipse Foundation was created by the community
Originally started as the Eclipse Project by IBM in November 2001, then transformed into an independent foundation in 2004 with support from a consortium of software vendors including IBM, Borland, HP, Intel, QNX, and SAP.
Executive Team
Mike Milinkovich
Executive Director
Has been Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation since 2004. Also serves as a director of the Open Source Initiative. Responsible for supporting both the Eclipse open source community and its commercial ecosystem.
Gaël Blondelle
Chief Membership Officer
Business Model
Revenue Model
Member-supported non-profit organization generating revenue through membership dues (35.9%), working group fees (45.7%), EU grant funding (6.5%), conference revenue (3.0%), and other sources (9.0%). The foundation provides shared-cost innovation model allowing companies to build commercial products on open source technologies while sharing development costs.
Pricing Tiers
Seat on Board of Directors and Architecture Council, General Assembly voting rights, logo promotion, ad hoc IP analysis, assistance launching open source initiatives, event discounts, marketing/advertising access
Same benefits as above tier
Same benefits as above tier
Same benefits as above tier
Same benefits as above tier
Representation on Board of Directors, eligibility to stand for board elections, General Assembly voting rights, event discounts, marketing programs access
Same benefits as above tier
Same benefits as above tier
Same benefits as above tier
Same benefits as above tier
Access to mailing lists, attendance at member meetings, guest membership in select Working Groups, use of foundation member logo
Same benefits as paid Associate tier
Board representation and election eligibility, General Assembly attendance, influence over licensing and governing policies. Available to active project contributors.
Target Markets
- Automotive manufacturers and suppliers (BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, Bosch, ZF, Valeo, CARIAD, Elektrobit)
- Enterprise software developers and organizations
- Cloud service providers (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba Cloud)
- Technology companies (IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, Huawei, Fujitsu)
- IoT and embedded systems developers
- Aerospace and space agencies (European Space Agency, NASA contributors)
- Enterprise Java application development
- Cloud-native and microservices architectures
- Automotive and software-defined vehicles (SDV)
- Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing
- Embedded systems and real-time operating systems (RTOS)
- Industrial automation and Industry 4.0
- IBM
- Microsoft
- Oracle
- Red Hat
History & Milestones
OpenHW Foundation joins Eclipse Foundation to expand open collaboration in RISC-V ecosystem
Eclipse Theia AI wins 2025 CODiE Award for Best Open Source Development Tool; Jakarta EE 11 released
Foundation hosts 400+ open source projects and 300+ members with 15,000+ contributors
Microsoft ThreadX contributed to Eclipse Foundation; Amazon joins Eclipse Foundation and SDV Working Group
Eclipse celebrates 20 years since the original Eclipse Project
1 AI Tool by Eclipse Foundation
Eclipse LMOS
13dOpen-source platform for building, deploying, and managing AI agents at scale with enterprise-grade capabilities.
