Total Eclipse to depart: Open-source software foundation is hopping the pond to Europe
- Reference: 1589275152
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/12/eclipse_moves_to_europe/
- Source link:
The outfit [2]already has a European office , in the form of the wholly owned subsidiary in Germany, Eclipse Foundation Europe GmBH. 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).
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."
The timing could be considered unfortunate, what with one thing and another, although there are no plans to move staffers around. Milinkovich said a small office might be opened in Brussels at some point in 2021, but cautioned that "all of these sorts of things need to be linked to growth." In the meantime, the foundation would make do with a Brussels mailing address.
As for what the Eclipse Foundation will get from re-domiciling, Milinkovich highlighted the contributions made from European countries. Commits from Germany and France account for a shade over 30 per cent of the total, with the US coming in at 12.7 per cent. "Europeans," he said, "want to operate under European law and Europeans want to have at least one open-source foundation that is distinctly European.
"And so that's why we decided to seize the opportunity."
The Eclipse Foundation is not the first of its ilk to look to where its fans are. The OpenStack project took its [3]Open Infrastructure Summit to Shanghai in November 2019 amid expectations that the APAC OpenStack market would see 36 per cent growth over the next four years.
The foundation has no plans head further east for the time being and UK Brexiteers will be disappointed to learn that Blighty's contortions had not figured in the decision to redomicile to the heart of the EU. The UK trails a distant fifth in contributions, with only 4.6 per cent of commits to Eclipse Projects.
Instead, the foundation has recognised that the European Commission is rather keen on the whole open-source thing, and so here we are.
Not much will change initially. Membership dues will eventually be stated in Euros and a new version of the membership agreement will be coming down the line to reflect the foundation's new status as a Belgian entity. The documentation is still in flight, but from a software standpoint "the expectation is that The Forge will be certainly up and running before the end of June," said Milinkovich. "By then, at the latest, we will have filed for the creation of the International Association in Belgium."
The legals should be complete a few months after that.
While the Eclipse IDE is what the foundation is best known for, Milinkovich was keen to emphasise that although it still retains a substantial footprint in the Java community, it also enjoyed support in the embedded software community. However, the apparent leapfrogging by Microsoft's Visual Studio Code clearly itches a little.
"Microsoft is executing extremely well," said Milinkovich, adding that he was shocked that Amazon and Google seemed not to be reacting. "My conjecture is that Microsoft won't do anything overt, it will be very subtle, but it'll just become just that little bit easier to deploy your workloads on Azure than into other clouds... It'll just happen to work a little tiny bit better."
It is too early to tell if the Eclipse Foundation's Theia will succeed in "building the IDEs of the future", as Milinkovich put it, as developers get used to coding in a browser and overhaul VS Code's commanding lead (particularly with the arrival of [4]GitHub Codespaces ). However, the gang are betting that the future will belong to those with "vendor-neutral open-source tools" in their line-up.
And for the Eclipse Foundation, that future is in Europe. ®
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[1] https://newsroom.eclipse.org/news/announcements/open-source-software-leader-eclipse-foundation-announces-transition-europe-part
[2] https://www.eclipse.org/org/press-release/20131029_efe_faq.php
[3] https://www.openstack.org/news/view/441/openstack-project-builds-momentum-in-greater-china-as-adoption-of-open-infrastructure-soars
[4] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/06/github_offers_hosted_visual_studio/
[5] https://go.theregister.co.uk/tl/1936/-8552/how-to-accelerate-brilliant-digital-experiences-with-low-code?td=wptl1936
Tip of the iceberg
I have noticed with a couple of open source projects that, when you look closer, a lot more of the development is actually done in Europe than it appears at first.
Many stewardship organisations, foundations etc. are in the US, behind a US legal entity and a .com or .org using American spelling, their moronic date notation and accepting donations in US Dollars but when you look at actual commits to the codebase (stored on git servers in the US) or the activity on the mailing list you'll notice that much (or most) of the activity is actually in Europe.
I recently realised this with the [1]OpenWRT project where some journalist based in California had used one of those "the maintainers didn't immediately respond to request for comments" lines and then had to be told that most of the developers are actually based in Europe and so he had emailed them in the middle of the night. On paper it's legally represented by the Software in the Public Interest (SPI) - a US 501(c)(3) non-profit organisation but in practice it's more European than American.
[2]The Document Foundation , the stewards behind LibreOffice, takes donations in US dollars by default and uses American spelling on its web site but are actually a German “stiftung” based in Berlin. Probably not that strange since it emerged out of OpenOffice which emerged out of StarOffice, which was a German product.
The organisation behind FreeBSD, [3]the FreeBSD Foundation , is an American 501(c)(3) non-profit organisation based in the US. Not that surprising given it emerged out of American universities. Looking at [4]code commits , or [5]the FreeBSD forums , however, shows that actually a lot of the contribution comes from Europe.
I have a feeling that Europe's willingness to open source (and more importantly, open standards) compared to the US says something about the two cultures' different approaches to business and supply chains. Here in the UK we have a long history of open standardisation, long before computers took off (though we're not that good at global standards, we like them invented here or we ignore them). The US is more a 'winner takes all approach' to capitalism (see how long it took to be able to have mobile phone handsets work across all telcos, that was the result of a deliberate policy choice to allow competing standards instead of competing companies) whereas Europe has more of a 'many smaller businesses approach' that are part of each other's supply chain. In Europe we also tend to be more strict on open competition, open tendering and anti-trust than the US. If you look at [6]which governments required the use of open document standards then European governments are ahead of any other continent.
Perhaps Europe is the most logical place for open source and open standards stewardship organisations.
[1] https://openwrt.org
[2] https://www.documentfoundation.org/
[3] https://www.freebsdfoundation.org
[4] https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/
[5] https://forums.freebsd.org/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument_adoption
Why?
"Brexiteers will be disappointed to learn that Blighty's contortions had not figured in the decision to redomicile to the heart of the EU"
Go on Richard give us a clue. I use their IDE and have for a long time and probably will do until they cock it up and I find something better. Where they are domiciled makes no odds to me as long as they can continue to provide good products. You might notice that they get contributions from the US and Europe (which is not only the EU) and the rest of the world.
Techxodus
Following RISC-V Foundation's move to Switzerland
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/26/riscv_foundation_switzerland/