12 ms·

The Eclipse Foundation Is Moving to Europe

244 points by tzmudzin 6y ago

sam_lowry_ 6y ago
Welcome to Belgium ;-)
phaemon 6y ago
Clearly they enjoyed FOSDEM so much, they decided to stay!
chrisseaton 6y ago
Some context not in here is that I think they're moving from Ottawa. I think a lot of people think they're quitting the US, and drawing lots of conclusions from that, but it's actually Canada.
- switch007 6y ago
  According to The Register, people aren't moving from Ottawa, and the legal entity is moving from the US to EU: > Executive director Mike Milinkovich told The Register: "This is about re-domiciling the legal entity that controls The Eclipse Foundation from the US to Europe." > Today's move is a little more major (although won't involve moving bottoms from Ottawa seats to something a bit more Belgian just yet). https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/12/eclipse_moves_to_europe/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/12/eclipse_moves_to_eu...
- helsinkiandrew 6y ago
  Aren’t they moving the parent US organisation registration to Europe? The Canadian operations seem to be staying untouched: >The Eclipse Foundation, while currently a USA incorporated not-for-profit organization, already manages its operations split between Canada and Europe, so there will be minimal to no impact to the Foundation’s operations.
- nocturnial 6y ago
  In the statement they said they were a "USA incorporated not-for-profit organization" which already manages operations between Canada (like you said) and the US. It also mentioned that the names, brand, trademark, intellectual property and anti-trust will be managed by the new belgian entity. There's nothing wrong with that. It sounds like the move is partially motivated by legal reasons. As an amateur who likes to know the details of laws, I'm interested what the differences are between their current legal entity and the new belgian one.
ape4 6y ago
Funny headline: "Total Eclipse to depart" https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/12/eclipse_moves_to_europe/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/12/eclipse_moves_to_eu...
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  IBM strategically named Eclipse to piss off Sun (and it worked: Sun couldn't come to grips with the total eclipse). It's ironic now that you can have a total Eclipse without the Sun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmLk2vSXXtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmLk2vSXXtk Total Eclipse: Klaus Nomi (from "Urgh! A Music War") Big shots Argue about what they've got Making the planet so hot Hot as a holocaust Blow up Everything's gonna go up Even if you don't show up In your Chemise Lacoste Total eclipse It's a total eclipse It's a total eclipse of the sun Can't come to grips with the total eclipse Just a slip of the lips and you're done Fall out Nobody left to crawl out If someone calls We're all out Turning in to French fries Last dance Let the entire cast dance Do the dismembered blast dance As we get atomized! Total eclipse It's a total eclipse It's a total eclipse of the sun Can't come to grips with the total eclipse Just a slip of the lips and you're done
  - KMag 6y ago
    Jikes, JikesRVM (formerly Jalepeno JVM), and SWT were all solid Java projects from IBM. I'm really sad that Sun didn't sell off Java to IBM before selling the rest of itself to Oracle ("the lawnmower", according to Bryan Cantrill). I understand that a big part of Sun's value was in Java, but the many-core high-I/O-bandwidth server business was still valuable to Oracle and synergized pretty well with Oracle's business (outside of the legal department). The value to the world as a whole was much higher with IBM (or, at a second choice, Google) owning Java and Oracle (or some other high-I/O bandwidth enterprise product vendor) owning the Sun hardware business. The Jikes compiler's startup time was so much faster than Sun's javac, and Java compilers perform very few optimizations when compiling source to bytecode. (My understanding is that the spec restricts which optimizations are allowed.) JikesRVM (a JVM written in Java) had surprisingly good performance for a small research project. It's bootstrap process involved AoT-compiling itself, so it would have been not too big a leap to have a general non-GCJ AoT for Java years earlier, and (because it uses its normal second-tier JIT for AoT compilation) presumably not too difficult to get the hot paths all re-inlined and re-optimized even through the AoT-compiled code. I think a very small minority of developers or users preferred the look of Swing (or worse, AWT) widgets to SWT. Sure, SWT widgets looked different across platforms, but the alien look of Swing/AWT widgets was very off-putting to users (and to a lesser extent, I tihnk, developers).
mcv 6y ago
Wasn't there an Eclipse-derived IDE already based in Belgium? Something springsource related perhaps? Sadly I can't find it anymore.
raverbashing 6y ago
So, is it the Eclipse foundation "all about Eclipse" now (ok I know that Eclipse is a big project) or there are other big projects under its umbrella?
- aarroyoc 6y ago
  There are other projects, nowadays it's more like the Apache Foundation. Some other big projects are Jakarta EE, Jetty, and Golo. List here: https://projects.eclipse.org/ https://projects.eclipse.org/
kindly_fo 6y ago
usa>eu
notadonut 6y ago
Eclipse added Huawei as a strategic member last fall: https://blog.huawei.com/2019/10/22/huawei-becomes-a-strategic-member-of-the-eclipse-foundation/ https://blog.huawei.com/2019/10/22/huawei-becomes-a-strategi... As well as another company that partners with a Chinese government lab. I have to wonder whether this was about technology transfer and geopolitics as it becomes more difficult to work with both China and the US.
- xenophonf 6y ago
  Eclipse is an open source project. There's no technology to transfer because it's already accessible to everyone. This move is about improving the foundation's governance, and the EU has several advantages over the United States in this regard.
  - jkingsbery 6y ago
    Genuinely curious. What are these? I was hoping to find these in the article. The article talks about growing in Europe (which seems like it should be possible if the "base" is in North America but with a large EU presence) and working on "innovative new open source projects" which should be doable from anywhere.
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      >"innovative new open source projects" which should be doable from anywhere not if you're an Iranian developer and shut out due to US sanctions, which someone like the Eclipse foundation would have to comply with if they were still located in the US. A year or so ago Github had to shut out Iranian, Syrian and Crimean developers for example.
      - jkingsbery 6y ago
        Interesting, I hadn't thought about that. My (limited) understanding is that US regulations are that firms that aid the government of Iran also are subject to sanction. If the move to Europe was primarily about allowing developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea to contribute, is there any threat to Eclipse's relationship with US developers?
mtnygard 6y ago
From the FAQ linked in the post: "This move will provide global stakeholders more choice for their strategic open source initiatives. We believe that more choice and greater diversity will be of benefit to both the global open source communities, and for the industries that rely upon and collaborate with them. The Eclipse Foundation aspires to be a truly global institution, now with a new European home." What does this really mean? If the move creates more choice, then what is restricting the choice today? If it creates greater diversity, what is restricting it today? This reads like there's something they're trying to say without saying, but I don't know what I should be reading between the lines.
- Dobbs 6y ago
  People who can't/won't travel to the US. Is probably the main thing.
  - addicted 6y ago
    Wouldn’t the main reason be that they are seeing most growth in Europe? If the majority of your developers are in Europe it would be cheaper to focus your efforts there. Further, it’s also closer to folks in Asia and probably easier and cheaper for them to travel.
  - eanzenberg 6y ago
    They’re moving from Canada, so assume people can’t/won’t travel to Canada.
    - jkaplowitz 6y ago
      Although their article clarifies that this isn't about changing anyone's physical location, as a general point about flying to/from Canada, many of the affordable itineraries involve connections through US airports and/or overfly US airspace (in a way that gives the US at least some authority over those flights). This is not true for all flights to/from Canada, of course, but it does add complexity, expense, and often travel time for people who want to deal with Canada while avoiding US authority.
greendave 6y ago
> The reason is straightforward – while we support a diverse, international ecosystem, most of our growth has already been happening in Europe. Makes sense to be where your developers/members are.
j-pb 6y ago
I wish all things eclipse would stay where they are, far far far away from me.
GiorgioG 6y ago
Serious question, how many people are still using Eclipse for day-to-day development?
- outside1234 6y ago
  The ones chained to their desks in a basement.
- SEJeff 6y ago
  A shocking amount of very sad enterprise developers I'm afraid. I interviewed a SWE candidate recently who told me they learned java and used eclipse in college. I suggested he ask for a refund of his tuition as a joke.
- mhaberl 6y ago
  Eclipse IDE about 20% it seems: https://snyk.io/wp-content/uploads/25a.png https://snyk.io/wp-content/uploads/25a.png But the Eclipse foundation has many projects that are not realted to the IDE: https://projects.eclipse.org/ https://projects.eclipse.org/
- v77 6y ago
  I didn't even know there was an Eclipse Foundation either. I thought they were an Apache Foundation project.
- fs111 6y ago
  The eclipse foundation is to eclipse what the Apache Software Foundation is to Apache httpd.
- rc_mob 6y ago
  Everyone at my office ecxept me uses eclipse. 22 eclipses and 1 intellij
- fishywang 6y ago
  Eclipse Foundation is a lot more than just Eclipse the IDE. For example, both Chromium and AOSP use Gerrit for code review, and JGit, an Eclipse project, is a key dependency of Gerrit. So everyone working with AOSP and Chromium day-to-day have to (indirectly) work with Eclipse Foundation projects.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wolfgke 6y ago
Why the headline "The Eclipse Foundation Is Moving to Europe"? This is like writing "ACME Is Moving to the American doublecontinent". Europe is very diverse in sense of languages, countries etc. So, they should better have written "The Eclipse Foundation Is Moving to Belgium".
- gowld 6y ago
  Why Belgium? Why not a city in Belgium? Europe is gelling into a political unit, with the EU and all.
  - wolfgke 6y ago
    > Europe is gelling into a political unit, with the EU and all. Similarly, North and Middle America with the NAFTA (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement&oldid=953332723 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=North_American_Fr...). Keep in mind that the EU started withtrade agreements, too.
    - allendoerfer 6y ago
      > Similarly North and Middle America with the NAFTA But they did not destroy each other completely two times during the last century, so they might be less convinced than Europe, that this is necessary.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Sure but the crucial thing might be Europe. For instance, I might tell a partner I'm going to the supermarket - not that I'm going to the Safeway Aisles 3/7/8 in the Safeway at the top of Diamond Heights in San Francisco. That's the magic of communication, knowing when to use the specific and when the general. I think they did well here.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >Europe is very diverse in sense of languages, countries etc. But not in its sense of handling legal entities. IP law and anything relevant to the operation of a foundation like this is mostly determined by EU law.
cesarb 6y ago
This reminds me of the RISC-V Foundation, which also moved to Europe a couple of months ago (https://riscv.org/risc-v-history/#international https://riscv.org/risc-v-history/#international).
- ngcc_hk 6y ago
  That move is china ...is this move as well
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
It seems Eclipse has been losing market share to VS Code. Maybe this is a ploy to get the European regulators to fine Microsoft for anti-competitive behavior with regards to VS Code.

244 points by tzmudzin 6y ago

sam_lowry_ 6y ago

Welcome to Belgium ;-)

phaemon 6y ago

Clearly they enjoyed FOSDEM so much, they decided to stay!

chrisseaton 6y ago

Some context not in here is that I think they're moving from Ottawa. I think a lot of people think they're quitting the US, and drawing lots of conclusions from that, but it's actually Canada.

switch007 6y ago
According to The Register, people aren't moving from Ottawa, and the legal entity is moving from the US to EU: > Executive director Mike Milinkovich told The Register: "This is about re-domiciling the legal entity that controls The Eclipse Foundation from the US to Europe." > Today's move is a little more major (although won't involve moving bottoms from Ottawa seats to something a bit more Belgian just yet). https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/12/eclipse_moves_to_europe/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/12/eclipse_moves_to_eu...
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
Aren’t they moving the parent US organisation registration to Europe? The Canadian operations seem to be staying untouched: >The Eclipse Foundation, while currently a USA incorporated not-for-profit organization, already manages its operations split between Canada and Europe, so there will be minimal to no impact to the Foundation’s operations.
nocturnial 6y ago
In the statement they said they were a "USA incorporated not-for-profit organization" which already manages operations between Canada (like you said) and the US. It also mentioned that the names, brand, trademark, intellectual property and anti-trust will be managed by the new belgian entity. There's nothing wrong with that. It sounds like the move is partially motivated by legal reasons. As an amateur who likes to know the details of laws, I'm interested what the differences are between their current legal entity and the new belgian one.

ape4 6y ago

Funny headline: "Total Eclipse to depart" https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/12/eclipse_moves_to_europe/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/12/eclipse_moves_to_eu...

DonHopkins 6y ago
IBM strategically named Eclipse to piss off Sun (and it worked: Sun couldn't come to grips with the total eclipse). It's ironic now that you can have a total Eclipse without the Sun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmLk2vSXXtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmLk2vSXXtk Total Eclipse: Klaus Nomi (from "Urgh! A Music War") Big shots Argue about what they've got Making the planet so hot Hot as a holocaust Blow up Everything's gonna go up Even if you don't show up In your Chemise Lacoste Total eclipse It's a total eclipse It's a total eclipse of the sun Can't come to grips with the total eclipse Just a slip of the lips and you're done Fall out Nobody left to crawl out If someone calls We're all out Turning in to French fries Last dance Let the entire cast dance Do the dismembered blast dance As we get atomized! Total eclipse It's a total eclipse It's a total eclipse of the sun Can't come to grips with the total eclipse Just a slip of the lips and you're done
- KMag 6y ago
  Jikes, JikesRVM (formerly Jalepeno JVM), and SWT were all solid Java projects from IBM. I'm really sad that Sun didn't sell off Java to IBM before selling the rest of itself to Oracle ("the lawnmower", according to Bryan Cantrill). I understand that a big part of Sun's value was in Java, but the many-core high-I/O-bandwidth server business was still valuable to Oracle and synergized pretty well with Oracle's business (outside of the legal department). The value to the world as a whole was much higher with IBM (or, at a second choice, Google) owning Java and Oracle (or some other high-I/O bandwidth enterprise product vendor) owning the Sun hardware business. The Jikes compiler's startup time was so much faster than Sun's javac, and Java compilers perform very few optimizations when compiling source to bytecode. (My understanding is that the spec restricts which optimizations are allowed.) JikesRVM (a JVM written in Java) had surprisingly good performance for a small research project. It's bootstrap process involved AoT-compiling itself, so it would have been not too big a leap to have a general non-GCJ AoT for Java years earlier, and (because it uses its normal second-tier JIT for AoT compilation) presumably not too difficult to get the hot paths all re-inlined and re-optimized even through the AoT-compiled code. I think a very small minority of developers or users preferred the look of Swing (or worse, AWT) widgets to SWT. Sure, SWT widgets looked different across platforms, but the alien look of Swing/AWT widgets was very off-putting to users (and to a lesser extent, I tihnk, developers).

mcv 6y ago

Wasn't there an Eclipse-derived IDE already based in Belgium? Something springsource related perhaps? Sadly I can't find it anymore.

raverbashing 6y ago

So, is it the Eclipse foundation "all about Eclipse" now (ok I know that Eclipse is a big project) or there are other big projects under its umbrella?

aarroyoc 6y ago
There are other projects, nowadays it's more like the Apache Foundation. Some other big projects are Jakarta EE, Jetty, and Golo. List here: https://projects.eclipse.org/ https://projects.eclipse.org/

kindly_fo 6y ago

usa>eu

notadonut 6y ago

Eclipse added Huawei as a strategic member last fall: https://blog.huawei.com/2019/10/22/huawei-becomes-a-strategic-member-of-the-eclipse-foundation/ https://blog.huawei.com/2019/10/22/huawei-becomes-a-strategi... As well as another company that partners with a Chinese government lab. I have to wonder whether this was about technology transfer and geopolitics as it becomes more difficult to work with both China and the US.

xenophonf 6y ago
Eclipse is an open source project. There's no technology to transfer because it's already accessible to everyone. This move is about improving the foundation's governance, and the EU has several advantages over the United States in this regard.
- jkingsbery 6y ago
  Genuinely curious. What are these? I was hoping to find these in the article. The article talks about growing in Europe (which seems like it should be possible if the "base" is in North America but with a large EU presence) and working on "innovative new open source projects" which should be doable from anywhere.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    >"innovative new open source projects" which should be doable from anywhere not if you're an Iranian developer and shut out due to US sanctions, which someone like the Eclipse foundation would have to comply with if they were still located in the US. A year or so ago Github had to shut out Iranian, Syrian and Crimean developers for example.
    - jkingsbery 6y ago
      Interesting, I hadn't thought about that. My (limited) understanding is that US regulations are that firms that aid the government of Iran also are subject to sanction. If the move to Europe was primarily about allowing developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea to contribute, is there any threat to Eclipse's relationship with US developers?

mtnygard 6y ago

From the FAQ linked in the post: "This move will provide global stakeholders more choice for their strategic open source initiatives. We believe that more choice and greater diversity will be of benefit to both the global open source communities, and for the industries that rely upon and collaborate with them. The Eclipse Foundation aspires to be a truly global institution, now with a new European home." What does this really mean? If the move creates more choice, then what is restricting the choice today? If it creates greater diversity, what is restricting it today? This reads like there's something they're trying to say without saying, but I don't know what I should be reading between the lines.

Dobbs 6y ago
People who can't/won't travel to the US. Is probably the main thing.
- addicted 6y ago
  Wouldn’t the main reason be that they are seeing most growth in Europe? If the majority of your developers are in Europe it would be cheaper to focus your efforts there. Further, it’s also closer to folks in Asia and probably easier and cheaper for them to travel.
- eanzenberg 6y ago
  They’re moving from Canada, so assume people can’t/won’t travel to Canada.
  - jkaplowitz 6y ago
    Although their article clarifies that this isn't about changing anyone's physical location, as a general point about flying to/from Canada, many of the affordable itineraries involve connections through US airports and/or overfly US airspace (in a way that gives the US at least some authority over those flights). This is not true for all flights to/from Canada, of course, but it does add complexity, expense, and often travel time for people who want to deal with Canada while avoiding US authority.

greendave 6y ago

> The reason is straightforward – while we support a diverse, international ecosystem, most of our growth has already been happening in Europe. Makes sense to be where your developers/members are.

j-pb 6y ago

I wish all things eclipse would stay where they are, far far far away from me.

GiorgioG 6y ago

Serious question, how many people are still using Eclipse for day-to-day development?

outside1234 6y ago
The ones chained to their desks in a basement.
SEJeff 6y ago
A shocking amount of very sad enterprise developers I'm afraid. I interviewed a SWE candidate recently who told me they learned java and used eclipse in college. I suggested he ask for a refund of his tuition as a joke.
mhaberl 6y ago
Eclipse IDE about 20% it seems: https://snyk.io/wp-content/uploads/25a.png https://snyk.io/wp-content/uploads/25a.png But the Eclipse foundation has many projects that are not realted to the IDE: https://projects.eclipse.org/ https://projects.eclipse.org/
v77 6y ago
I didn't even know there was an Eclipse Foundation either. I thought they were an Apache Foundation project.
fs111 6y ago
The eclipse foundation is to eclipse what the Apache Software Foundation is to Apache httpd.
rc_mob 6y ago
Everyone at my office ecxept me uses eclipse. 22 eclipses and 1 intellij
fishywang 6y ago
Eclipse Foundation is a lot more than just Eclipse the IDE. For example, both Chromium and AOSP use Gerrit for code review, and JGit, an Eclipse project, is a key dependency of Gerrit. So everyone working with AOSP and Chromium day-to-day have to (indirectly) work with Eclipse Foundation projects.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

wolfgke 6y ago

Why the headline "The Eclipse Foundation Is Moving to Europe"? This is like writing "ACME Is Moving to the American doublecontinent". Europe is very diverse in sense of languages, countries etc. So, they should better have written "The Eclipse Foundation Is Moving to Belgium".

gowld 6y ago
Why Belgium? Why not a city in Belgium? Europe is gelling into a political unit, with the EU and all.
- wolfgke 6y ago
  > Europe is gelling into a political unit, with the EU and all. Similarly, North and Middle America with the NAFTA (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement&oldid=953332723 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=North_American_Fr...). Keep in mind that the EU started withtrade agreements, too.
  - allendoerfer 6y ago
    > Similarly North and Middle America with the NAFTA But they did not destroy each other completely two times during the last century, so they might be less convinced than Europe, that this is necessary.
renewiltord 6y ago
Sure but the crucial thing might be Europe. For instance, I might tell a partner I'm going to the supermarket - not that I'm going to the Safeway Aisles 3/7/8 in the Safeway at the top of Diamond Heights in San Francisco. That's the magic of communication, knowing when to use the specific and when the general. I think they did well here.
Barrin92 6y ago
>Europe is very diverse in sense of languages, countries etc. But not in its sense of handling legal entities. IP law and anything relevant to the operation of a foundation like this is mostly determined by EU law.

cesarb 6y ago

This reminds me of the RISC-V Foundation, which also moved to Europe a couple of months ago (https://riscv.org/risc-v-history/#international https://riscv.org/risc-v-history/#international).

ngcc_hk 6y ago
That move is china ...is this move as well

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

It seems Eclipse has been losing market share to VS Code. Maybe this is a ploy to get the European regulators to fine Microsoft for anti-competitive behavior with regards to VS Code.