Eclipse

Eclipse.org is one of the fastest growing open-source communities in the world. It was founded in November 2001 by Borland, IBM, Merant, QNX Software, Rational Software, Red Hat, SuSE, TogetherSoft and WebAgain. The initial code contribution was made by IBM that contributed parts of the code from their Visual Age product. Today all technology and source code provided to and developed by this community is made available royalty-free via the Eclipse Public License.

The Eclipse platform is a framework for building development environments. The platform is built on top of an OSGI framework that creates a plug-in based environment that makes it possible to build a tailor-made development environment for every organization. Eclipse platform is developed in Java that makes it possible to use the platform on most architectures like Linux, Windows and MacOS. Within Eclipse more than 100 subprojects have been developed, the most active projects are JDT (Java Development Tools), CDT (C/C++ Development Tools) and EMF (Eclipse Modeling Project). In addition a marketplace for plug-ins has also been developed, where more than 1.5 million different tools can be downloaded to make the IDE as best as it get. In this marketplace both free and commercial plug-ins are published.

Today the Eclipse Foundation is funded by annual dues from their members and governed by the Board of Directors. The corporate sponsors that are active today are Amazon, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Novell, AMD, Debeka, Google, HP and Magma Communication.

One of the most recent Eclipse projects is the Auto-IWG initiative. This project will be open to any organizations that want to participate in the goal of establishing a standard tools platform that will be used throughout the automotive supply chain. ARCCORE will initially work with the goals in the WP4 package.

For more information visit http://www.eclipse.org and http://wiki.eclipse.org/Auto_IWG.