UPDATE: Eclipse Foundation Unveils Board Members

In addition to IBM, Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, MontaVista Software, QNX, SAP and Serena Software also are on the board of the new Eclipse Foundation, which made the announcement at the first-ever EclipseCon show in Anaheim, Calif.

At the conference Tuesday, the group, which was spun off from IBM, is expected to introduce all of the members, as well as the specific names of the individuals representing each company on the board. Skip McGaughey, the current chairperson of Eclipse, previously told CRN that 48 companies have signed on for foundation membership.

Monday, HP and MontaVista named their Eclipse board representatives. Michael Rank, director of developer resources and partner enablement for HP's Management Software Organization, represents HP on the new Eclipse board, while MontaVista CEO Jim Ready will represent his company.

Additionally, three platform leaders who are responsible for the Eclipse software offerings also will serve on the board.

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Eclipse was to begin interviewing candidates this week to fill a full-time executive director position to lead the newly formed nonprofit group, and will announce the director in the next few weeks. The executive director will answer to the Eclipse Foundation board and will be aided through the transition by McGaughey.

Plans call for the new organization to have several membership tiers, as previously reported. At the highest level will be strategic commercial companies the group is calling "Strategic Developers" and "Strategic Consumers" that contribute funds and resources to Eclipse. They also contribute annual dues of $5,000 to the group.

Other membership categories include individual developers called "Add-In Providers," or "committers," which are authorized to contribute code to the Eclipse open-source integrated development environment (IDE); the platform leaders, individuals that sit on the board and oversee Eclipse technology; and "Open Source Project Leaders," such as open-source consortia, academic institutions and research organizations, according to the foundation. Add-In Providers also contribute annual dues, while open-source groups and platform leaders join Eclipse for free.

IBM formed Eclipse in November 2001 to provide a standard IDE for using multiple tools from different vendors simultaneously, an effort to solve compatibility problems between different vendors' Java tools. Any tools vendor can download Eclipse for free and create plug-ins to the framework that allow their tools to work seamlessly within the IDE.

Though many of the leading software and tools vendors -- such as Macromedia, Oracle and SAP -- have been members of IBM's version of the Eclipse organization, Sun Microsystems has opted not to join because of its long-standing power struggle with IBM over the control of Java. BEA Systems, IBM's archrival in the Java application-server market, has also steered clear.

Late last Thursday, Sun sent an open letter to Eclipse urging the group to use its power to unify the Java tools community and reiterating its stance not to join the foundation at this time. Sun, Santa Clara, Calif., also used the letter to promote its own vested interested in the NetBeans open-source Java integrated development environment (IDE), a rival to the Eclipse IDE.

To further complicate matters, two weeks ago, Sun and a group of vendors--including BEA as well as some Eclipse supporters--formed the Java Tools Community (JTC), an effort aimed at providing standards for interoperability between Java tools. The JTC will work in conjunction with the Java Community Process (JCP). Supervised by Sun, the JCP creates Java standards.