My slides from EclipseCon Europe 2017 on the Eclipse Foundation's position and strategy.

1. Welcome to our update on the “state of the
union” at the Eclipse Foundation, and let me
start off by saying: the state of the union is
good.
Things are going great.

2. So, we have accomplished a lot in the last
year...

3. and in particular I want to give a warm thank
you to Dani Megert and the whole Eclipse
Platform team; Stephan Herrmann, Noopur
Gupta, everybody for doing a great job for
shipping Java 9 support in the Eclipse IDE. I
know it’s been a long road to get all the
modularity support and everything into JDT, so
thank you for the work you put into making that
possible. Thanks!

4. And earlier this year, we shipped the Oxygen
release train; you know, one of the signs you’re
getting older is you start to forget numbers, I
mean, I think this is now the 11th or 12th
release train. Something like that.
So, one of the amazing things that I tell this
story around the world, all over the place, and
in various contexts. You know we run a truly
open community that just happens to have the
maturity of process and the maturity of people
that are involved to be able to ship large
software releases, on time, to the day, for over

5. a decade straight. That’s an incredible
accomplishment.
And these simultaneous releases are non-trivial
pieces of software, like, let’s not forget that we're
talking about: seventy one million lines of code,
coordinating the activities of almost 1000 different
people, to ship on time to the day, year after year. I
think it’s an incredible accomplishment and thank
you to all of the people in this room that were
involved.

6. We had a lot of success in our working groups.
The Science working group just shipped their
second simultaneous release. So congrats to
those.
The IoT folks, we just had two more projects
for DDS protocol implementation and a web of
things implementation that were announced,
so the Iot community continues to grow.
Polarsys is continuing their work on modeling

7. tools. They created the Capella Industry
Consortium this year, so they’ve been busy with
that.
And finally LocationTech, which is our Geospatial
community is just in the process of onboarding two
more new projects, and it’s in the process of being
a lead and host for FOSS4G North America
conference for next year. So that community is
continuing to grow and do great things in the world
of geospatial.

8. The Eclipse Foundation itself, is almost 14
years old, and originally it started off as a place
to have an independent, vendor neutral home,
for a few projects. I think when we first created
the Eclipse Foundation, of course there was
the Eclipse Java IDE for which we are still best
known for. But there was the CDT project that
was already around at that time. I think there
was 12 in total and all of the projects were
about tools, and all of the projects were
basically building Eclipse IDE plugins, and
we’ve grown since those fairly humble

9. beginnings to becoming truly a platform for
collaboration and innovation. And the sheer volume
of technology that’s happening at the Eclipse
Foundation today is incredible. You know, we have
over 340 projects and as I’m about to go through,
the growth that we are about to experience is going
to be quite incredible.

10. So people are listening to this message, that
the Eclipse Foundation is a platform for open
collaboration. This is by the way, a picture of
one of my favorite Canadian rock bands, the
Sheepdogs, and they’re a classic story just like
the Eclipse Foundation. They were an overnight
success; that had been doing road tours and
garage bands for over a decade. A couple of
weeks ago at JavaOne, that was the kind of the
way I felt a little bit, because all of a sudden,
with JavaEE coming to Eclipse (which I’ll talk
about again in a moment) it’s been a huge

11. change in the perception of what the Eclipse
Foundation is and what it is that we do. So people
are really open and listening to this message of
open collaboration at the Eclipse Foundation.

12. So this is the big news at the moment, so for
those of you who haven’t heard, a couple
weeks ago Oracle in conjunction with IBM and
Red Hat, Tomitribe and Payara and a few
others announced that they were going to be
moving JavaEE, lock, stock and barrel to the
Eclipse Foundation. And so this is an incredible
new chapter for us, as a community, and for
the Eclipse Foundation as an institution. Just to
put this into perspective, we’re looking through
the list of things that need to be done; bringing
JavaEE over to Eclipse involves starting

13. approximately 40 new projects at once; which is
going to be fun!
And the thing that’s unique about this, if you know
anything of the history of how Java has been put
together over the years, that as part of this process,
Oracle is going to be open sourcing the TCKs (Test
Compatibility Kits) for Java EE at the Eclipse
Foundation. So for the first time, the ability to test
your Java implementation is going to be open
source and the Eclipse Foundation is going to get
into the business, if you will, of writing
specifications. So in the future, the evolution of
Java EE is going to be spec’d by a new process
that we haven’t built yet at the Eclipse Foundation.
So this is an incredible new chapter for us as an
institution and for us as a community.

14. Another new project at Eclipse Foundation that
I think is pretty interesting is OpenJ9. IBM open
sourced their JavaVM at the Eclipse
Foundation, so in conjunction with openJDK,
you can now get a running Java that is built on
top of a complete open-source stack. And
OpenJ9 is a very mature product, it’s been the
basis of the IBM Websphere product line for
many years and interestingly, its roots are in
embedded from way way back so it is actually
quite small, and in some ways, very suitable for
IoT and embedded applications. So it’s going

15. to be really interesting to see the trajectory of
OpenJ9 over the years.

16. Eclipse Microprofile started earlier this year, but
this is an effort to create specs for
microservices in Java at the Eclipse Foundation
and this has been a great project, and has built
a really interesting and vibrant community, and
very quickly at Eclipse. And having Microprofile
at Eclipse is definitely one of the reasons why
Oracle was interested in bringing JavaEE to us.
So it’s definitely been a big part of our recent
success.

17. So what we are seeing with other projects
including Vert.x, Jetty, EclipseLink and Eclipse
Collections; that really, what’s happening at the
Eclipse Foundation is we’re becoming the
centre of gravity for innovation in the Java
language and the Java platform. Sorry, the
Java language is probably an exaggeration
cause that’s going to keep happening at
OpenJDK, but definitely in terms of Enterprise
Java and in the future, what does it mean to be
cloud native Java. These kinds of things are
happening at the Eclipse Foundation today,

18. and I think that’s really, terribly exciting.

19. So it’s been a big couple of months since
Microprofile came and then OpenJ9 and then
JavaEE; we have a lot of work to do, but it’s a
very exciting inflection point in the history of
the Eclipse Foundation. But, yes, we are doing
really well in Java, but there is other technology
areas as well.

20. So I just wanted to touch on a few, particularly
in a city, in an area like Stuttgart, it would be
silly not to mention we have a lot of activities
going on in Automotive, so OpenMDM is
building big data tools for dealing with the kind
of measurement data that you’d deal with as
an Automotive OEM.
OpenPASS is about doing simulation to help
reduce the costs of developing advanced
driving systems.

21. Eclipse Sumo was about doing large scale, city-
wide traffic simulations, it comes from DLR, so it’s
pretty cool technology; and then OpenADx is a
thing that we’re just in the process of getting
started with organizations like Bosch and Microsoft
around building a tool chain for advanced driving
systems.
(In North America, we call them autonomous driving
systems, but all my German friends say no, no, it’s
not autonomous, it’s only advanced.)

22. Another area that I think is really cool is, thanks
to the Science Working Group and our friends
at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, we
have our first Quantum Computing project.
XACC is a tool set for doing simulations of
Quantum Computers and it has a very specific
goal; their opinion is that for many years
quantum computers are going to be like an
adjunct processor, so there's going to be a
hybrid programming model where you’re going
to be building some of your software using
classical computer techniques on a normal

23. computer but you’ll have a co-processor that
happens to be a quantum computer. Just like, for
today in some cases you might have a GPU. So this
is a hybrid programming model for helping you
build software that is a mix of classical computing
and quantum computing.
I mean, if you know anything about sort of the
history of computing, the fact this is coming from
Oak Ridge is extremely cool and exciting. This is
definitely one of the centres of quantum computing
in the world.

24. And then, machine learning.
So AI and machine learning are of course,
very,very important topics, and just two weeks
ago I guess, two Friday’s ago, it was
announced by a company called Skymind, that
they were bringing DeepLearning4J, which is
the leading machine learning framework on the
JVM to the Eclipse Foundation as a project. So
we are starting to get into machine learning
and AI as well, and this is a project that is very
popular on github and I think it has a lot of

25. potential as an Eclipse project as well.

26. And it was, one of things that was kind of fun
for us was there was a really interesting Twitter
conversation about why did Skymind bring
DL4J to the Eclipse Foundation as opposed to
the the Apache Software Foundation. And I’m
not going to read the whole thing here, but it
was very gratifying for us who work at the
foundation to have somebody say we love the
governance model that the Eclipse Foundation
brings to our project and we chose to bring out
project to Eclipse because of that governance
model.

27. So that was something that we really appreciated
very much.

28. So really the Eclipse Foundation is a platform
for innovation and collaboration, and we do
this by providing a number of key services to
all of our projects and all of the organizations
that are involved with us. So it’s all about
providing Governance, project management,
it’s about providing IT infrastructure, IP and
licensing management. All of the services that
we provide to our projects and our community
is really what’s enabling the Eclipse Foundation
to act as this open collaboration platform.

29. Of course our heritage is in tools, and the
Eclipse IDE continues to be a huge part of our
present and future success. But you know,
basically since the day we started the Eclipse
Foundation, we’ve been doing things other
than tools. We shipped RCP (Rich Client
Platform) which is a runtime; we shipped that in
2004, so we’ve been doing this runtime
technology stuff for a very long time. But now
the message is getting out and more and more
very cool runtime projects are coming to the
Eclipse Foundation and so, that’s what we do;

30. we are a platform for innovation and collaboration.

31. So thank you very much!