Microsoft expands support with The Eclipse Foundation

At Microsoft, our goal is to empower all developers to be successful building any application, using any language, on any platform. To do so, we are committed to building open, flexible technology, and to working together with the open source community to grow together as an industry.

Microsoft has worked with the Eclipse community for many years and we joined the Eclipse Foundation in 2016. Today I’m excited to share Microsoft is continuing to advance our support of the Eclipse Foundation AISBL by expanding our participation to a Strategic Member. I will also be joining the Foundation’s board of directors and I look forward to working alongside our industry partners.

The Eclipse Foundation has a long history of providing a strong, collaborative culture supporting open-source-licensed projects, and many of those projects are important to Microsoft, our partners, and our customers. It is important for Microsoft to support the organization that supports those projects, and to work within the organization towards those collective goals.

Collaboration in community

The Eclipse Foundation has deep expertise in vendor-neutral governance, infrastructure, marketing, community building, and developer advocacy work. The team showed initiative and forethought, and pivoted to become a European-based international non-profit organization to align with its membership. The Eclipse Foundation is a natural place for Microsoft to collaborate on new initiatives beginning with European partners.

The Eclipse Foundation remains a vital cornerstone of the Java ecosystem. Microsoft is committed to Java developers and the health of the Java ecosystem, actively participating in Eclipse Adoptium (formerly AdoptOpenJDK) and other projects. Expanding our involvement with the Foundation as a Strategic Member will help advance modern Java initiatives in the spirit of open source.

The Eclipse Foundation also has close ties with core parts of the Java community with the Eclipse IDE, Jakarta EE (the successor to Java EE), and MicroProfile projects hosted there. For Microsoft and its partners, the Eclipse Foundation was the logical choice for AdoptOpenJDK to continue that mission. As a vendor-neutral, multi-vendor initiative, Eclipse Adoptium continues to be a leading provider of fully compatible, high-quality distributions of Java runtimes based on OpenJDK source code.

The Eclipse Foundation is expanding its role through working groups and many of these working groups are important to Microsoft and its partners. Recent work around the Eclipse Dataspace Connector and Eclipse Tractus-X are examples of new work beginning at the Eclipse Foundation in working groups in which Microsoft has an interest in participating.

Looking ahead

Open source non-profits serve an important role in the community, providing the structure to enable projects to reach their next opportunity of growth. Companies support such non-profits because it supports their engagement in the non-profit’s projects, supports relationships with collaborating partners, and supports the developer communities at large. Having a rich ecosystem of healthy non-profits supporting different groups of Open-Source-Initiative-licensed projects and their project ecosystems is a must. At Microsoft, we are committed to continuing to support and participate across the non-profit ecosystem, as well as engage in projects themselves.

Stephen Walli

Principal Program Manager, Azure Office of the CTO

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