The Eclipse Foundation – software sustainability and European sovereignty – Gaël Blondelle

Walid : new episode of Projets Libres!. Today, we’re going to talk about a topic that we’ve already covered several times on the podcast. I’m linking to the episode again… on the economic models and governance of free software. We’ve talked at length about foundations and that’s good because today, we’re going to talk about the Eclipse Foundation. To talk about the Eclipse Foundation, I am not alone. Like the previous recording, I’m with my friend Raphaël Semeteys, whom you’ve already heard several times on the podcast. And so, with us today, we have a distinguished guest. We have Gaël Blondelle, who is one of the directors of the Eclipse Foundation. So listen Gaël, thank you for agreeing to answer our questions and welcome to the Projet Libre podcast.

Gaël : excellent, thank you very much for inviting me, it’s going very well and I look forward to this time of exchange with you.

Walid :p arfait, Raphaël, I hope you’re doing well too.

Raphaël : yes, it’s going great, thank you for inviting me back and I’m very happy to see Gaël again.

Presentation and career of Gaël Blondelle

Walid : Well perfect, as usual, the first questions Gaël, we’re going to ask you to introduce yourself, we’d like you to explain a little bit who you are and what your background is in free software please.

Gaël : yes. I’m Gaël Blondelle, as you said, I work for the Eclipse Foundation. It’s been more than 20 years since I started in open source. My first contact with open source was at the time, I was working at Orange, but it was still called France Telecom. We were doing tests on the various Java application servers, etc.

And at the time, I had been confronted by Jboss and JOnAS. I was able to participate in an Object Web conference. And I found it, I said to myself, “wow, this thing is nice. There are people, they come there to meet and try to write software together.” So, afterwards, I said to myself, “I’m going to continue in this way”. That’s it, it’s been 20 years since this little episode took place.

And for the past 20 years, more or less, I’ve always done things around open source. So, at the time, I created a company that made an open source ESB called Petals. I was CTO of pEtALS until 2010. I was also one of the people who co-founded OW2. Then, I worked for a few years for Obeo. It’s with Obeo, which is one of our French SMEs, which does a lot of open source. It was with Obeo that I entered the Eclipse ecosystem full of life.

In 2013, I started at the Eclipse Foundation. to support a project, at the time it was called PolarSys, and to finally make my little career at the Eclipse Foundation for more than ten years now and become one of its directors. So my title today is Chief Membership Officer, so I take care of everything related to helping our members collaborate better and recruiting members to provide relevant added value to the members of the Foundation. And also, I am the director of our European branch. And so, I manage the entire European team of the foundation. So there you have it, one of the elements that I also liked in this whole story is that I’ve been working remotely since 2010. And even if for today, it may be a bit commonplace to work remotely, it’s something that I’ve enjoyed quite a bit since I joined Obeo, which seem to me to be particularly possible in types of positions like mine where I still have a lot to travel. I like to have these moments when I travel a lot and I go to meet people, I go to meet communities, I go to meet potential partners. And then, I have other moments when I’m in my office and I can process a little bit of all this. There you go.

Another element… What I would like to mention is that since the beginning of the year, I have been appointed to the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative. This is something that makes me very happy and that is very close to my heart because the Open Source Initiative is the organization in charge of defining Open Source. Today, we also have another activity which is to create a definition for Open Source AI and participate in the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative. It’s something I’ve been tempted to do for a long time and when I was offered, I didn’t hesitate.

Walid : So, listeners and editors can’t see the smile on Raphael’s face when we said Open Source AI.

Raphaël : Yes, it’s one of my subjects.

Walid : Yes, I know, absolutely. We’ll discuss it again, I think, in other episodes of the podcast.

Raphaël : I think we have to do that.

Gaël : yes, it’s not… Exactly, this is not necessarily the subject on which I think we can expand today because it is still really something that is underway and we will be able to talk about it, I think, more seriously in a few weeks.

Raphaël : Ah, gladly.

What is the Eclipse Foundation?

Walid : ok, very good. Look, I think the first thing that wouldn’t be bad is to start by introducing the Eclipse Foundation.

Gaël : the Eclipse Foundation. So, you have to remember that in 2001, IBM released the IDE Eclipse. This was around the same time as the creation of the Apache Foundation and other projects, the adoption, the rise of Linux, etc. And in fact, the Eclipse idea was quickly a big success, but the various partners of the platform wanted there to be an Open Source foundation that was Vendor neutral but a neutral place to collaborate with peers, without having the impression of contributing only to a project that would be a project that would belong to IBM.

So in 2004, just 20 years ago, the Eclipse Foundation was created. And in the beginning, it was really something centered around the Eclipse IDE. That is to say, there were significant constraints in terms of technology. They had to be projects written in Java, they had to be projects that run in the Eclipse platform, they had to be OSGI bundles. I don’t know if it will make some people smile. And that was from the creation of the foundation until 2010-2012, when in fact, in 2010, we started to say: “in the end, what’s important is not the programming language, it’s not the way we package projects, it’s the governance, the way we create communities, the way we manage intellectual property, etc”.

In 2012, all these restrictions were dropped. We have opened up to welcoming many more projects. And we created a first one, what we call Working Groups, interest groups around the IoT. And so, I think those who are listening to us, if you’re doing IoT and you’re using MQTT, there’s still a great, big chance that you’re using at least one project that’s hosted at the Eclipse Foundation, whether it’s… Paho, Mosquitto or others. And that’s really a pivotal moment, that moment when we let go of the idea that everything has to be written in Java and packaged in OSGI, and we said, what’s important is how we create communities.

Raphaël : So wait, because I have a question anyway. Because before that, before that pivot, when you talk about the Eclipse IDE, you say platform too. That is to say, from the start, it was still… A kind of platform, was there an ecosystem around it? You were talking about Obeo, you were talking about PolarSys. It was still, for me, at the time, more than just an IDE, in fact, already at that time.

Gaël : Yes, absolutely. So, indeed, in the dates I mentioned, I am missing a date that I no longer know exactly where to place, which is the creation of Eclipse RCP, for Rich Client Platform, because at the beginning, it was really… Java, C, C++ development tools. And at some point, there was the creation of Eclipse RCP. And that really made it possible to create this platform that has been used to create tens of thousands of applications. And today, I think that there is still Eclipse RCP that is used to fly missions that are on Mars. There are satellite ground segments that are based on this. There are a lot of applications that have used this platform.

In terms of open source, we can come back to that, but in terms of open source strategy, I think it’s super interesting. The idea that Eclipse’s success comes from the fact that it’s an extensible platform. Maybe we can say that the success of Eclipse lies in OSGI, but in a way, it’s more than that. It’s the idea of having designed a platform that makes services usable. Want to write Java? you can write Java. There are many things that can be used. But behind it, the fact of making it extensible and allowing anyone to create an application to manage switches, manage rail traffic, etc. I’m sure there are. It’s this platform aspect that made this possible.

Walid : If there are people who use Eclipse for rail projects, contact me. I’m a fan.

Raphaël : I know that Lotus, at some point, there is also an RCP version, for example, at IBM.

Gaël : Indeed, we are talking about applications that are not necessarily used much today. I don’t know. In fact, yes, it had to… You must know better than I do, Raphael. No

Raphaël : I don’t know. But at the time anyway, it was to show how much it was really a bit of a universal thing, which could be used by a lot of people, including IBM.

Gaël : Absolutely. In fact, there are two important things to remember about this. It was indeed when IBM rewrote Lotus on an Eclipse basis. I think it was like it was at the time in all the banks and everywhere. It was the largest deployment of the Eclipse platform in the world. There were millions of copies. So that’s one element. And it’s this platform, again, that’s super important. Another element is in terms of business model (Editor’s note: economic model). In fact, Eclipse has always been an approach that aimed to collaborate on platforms, collaborate on what we can share and create products on top of it. You talk about Lotus, but you also have to keep in mind that all Rational products were also based on the Eclipse platform. This represented a turnover at IBM, for example, of around 5 billion dollars per year.

This is important because just because you’re doing open source doesn’t mean you can’t find mechanisms to monetize products or build products based on an open source platform.

And again, it’s based a lot on this side of extensibility. And for it to work, people have to collaborate honestly. That is to say, what we put in the common part, it works, there is no limitation, it provides a service to the people who use it and it is really something that allows us to build applications. And the idea is to have open source platforms that allow you to create products that… some of which may be Open Source, as was the case with the Java IDE, and others may be products that are proprietary products. Why is it interesting to talk about it? Because it shaped the way the Eclipse Foundation defined what we call the Eclipse Development Process, which is actually the way we manage intellectual property, the way people collaborate with each other, etc.

Because typically, in order to be able to build products based on an Open Source platform, we created the license… the Eclipse Public License at the time, which had good features to do just that. Today, we’ve evolved a lot for a long time, we also wanted the projects to really all be under Eclipse Public License. Today, we have four default licenses, which are the EPL, the Apache license, the MIT license and the BSD license, because these are the ones that are known as… as being permissive and that allow us to have this approach of collaboration and also of productization.

But we have projects that are under other licenses and in fact, we are really more and more open to all types of licenses.

The legal form of the foundation in the USA

Walid : At the very beginning, the foundation, when it is created, it is created in the United States. What is its legal form?

Gaël : In the United States, you have two types of Open Source foundations, 501.c3 and 501.c6. So the c3 is… the Open Source Initiative and a C3, the Free Software Foundation and a C3 as well. And the Eclipse Foundation is a c6. The idea is that the C3 is more what we would call public interest associations, while the C6 is more associations, including between companies. That’s it, it’s closer to company unions or something like that. So the legal form of the Eclipse Foundation, in the United States, is a 501.c6.

The Foundation’s areas of activity

Walid : When the Foundation was created, what did you define as a field of activity?

Gaël : ah, do you mean in the statutes?

Walid : Yes, that is to say, in fact, were there any particular things or was it just to support the development of this platform?

Gaël : The objective of the Eclipse Foundation as it was created was to provide, so I translate on the fly, to provide a neutral development environment to develop Open Source technologies in an open way. Specifications, platforms, runtimes, frameworks, and tools, all collectively referred to as Eclipse Technologies. The role of the Eclipse Foundation is to enable the creation, evolution, promotion, and support of Eclipse technologies and to cultivate an Open Source community and an ecosystem of complementary products and services. So that’s kind of the way in which, in legal language, we described all this.

What is the purpose of a foundation?

Gaël : But in fact, there are two subjects. I don’t know if you touched on it in your previous podcast, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to spend a minute on the subject of what’s the point of a foundation?

Walid : Go ahead.

Gaël : Because actually… Today, more and more, people are doing open source on GitHub and developers are very happy with the GitHub platform. And basically, when you start on GitHub, you have everything you need to start your project very quickly, to potentially start gaining some credibility with stars, start collaborating with your partners, etc. It’s a kind of organic open source creation. After that, you have a style of Open Source which is the Open Source Single Vendor , so the open source of software publishers, who in fact use Open Source most of the time to create a community of users. So telling developers, “look, use my technology, go ahead, go open source, and then at some point, I’m going to try to go to your managers to try to sell them advanced features, things like that.”

And then you have the Open Source foundations. The role of Open Source foundations is to ensure the sustainability of projects. And that’s super important, which is to say that a project that comes to an Open Source foundation, whether it’s at Apache, whether it’s at Linux, at Mozilla, at Eclipse, etc.

A project in a foundation, somewhere, we know the rules of the game and we know that the people around this foundation are not going to change the rules of the game. And that’s super important, especially today that we’ve had a few surprises in the coming years with companies that were open source software publishers and that had the impression that, in fact, because of open source, they were losing revenue because they had users who weren’t customers, but who were users who had a serious use of their platform. And which have moved away from Open Source licenses.

And so at the same time… in my role at the Eclipse Foundation and in my role at the Open Source Initiative, it’s something that is close to my heart, this idea that Open Source, to call something Open Source, it has to use a license that was accepted by the Open Source Initiative and that behind it, Open Source projects, When they arrive at a foundation, it brings this sustainability and it brings this certainty about the rules of the game and the fact that we are not going to review the rules of collaboration overnight. which offers security to people who want to use this technology to create products on top of it.

Raphaël : And then there’s this somewhat legal aspect too, isn’t it? Legal protection, to have an entity that has a legal existence.

Gaël : Absolutely, yes. So, I’m going to talk a little bit about foundations in general. What do we do at the Eclipse Foundation? We provide a collaborative infrastructure, but today… Our collaboration infrastructure is GitHub or our own GitLab servers, which are deployed in France at OVH. And that was important 20 years ago, but it has become quite common. Around that, what do we provide? We have our Eclipse Development Process which is very well documented and which in fact means that when a developer knows how to contribute to an Eclipse project, in fact, he knows how to contribute to our 430 projects because everything happens in a similar way.

We have our Eclipse IP Process, so the process of managing intellectual property. And in fact, the result of the way intellectual property is managed at the Eclipse Foundation. This is because we can consider that a project that comes from the Eclipse Foundation can be used to create products or can be deployed in a company without taking legal risks. That is to say, we know that the origin of all intellectual property has been traced. that the licenses are clean, that the dependency licenses are compatible, that the dependencies of the dependencies are compatible with each other, etc.

I don’t know if you’ve ever done a podcast on OpenChain, but typically, at the Eclipse Foundation, we consider ourselves OpenChain compliant. At the Eclipse Foundation, we are OpenChain compliant because our processes are themselves compliant with… Openchain’s requirements, which means that all the foundation’s projects have this compliance.

Software bills of materials (SBOM)

Walid : We talked about SBOM ( Software Bill of Materials) nomenclatures, software nomenclatures, with Benjamin Jean in an episode. Already, a little bit, we’ve started a little.

Gaël : So, I was talking to you about intellectual property. SBOMs and the whole problem of security, that’s what we’re implementing. And we’ve long been known to be very good at managing compliance on licenses, etc. Our goal is to provide the same level of service and excellence to developers on everything related to software supply chain security. So on SBOMs, on forcing developers to have Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) set up, on the signing of all binaries.

We even have projects that do reproducible builds, so this is the case in particular for Temurin, the projects around Adoptium. We know exactly how to prove that the Temurin binary you download is the binary that corresponds to this Git checksum , because the builds are reproduced.

Walid : For people who are interested, I invite you to go and listen to the episode with Benjamin Jean, where we talk about all this and which introduces all these subjects.

The evolution of the foundation

Walid : I wanted to come back because in fact, we haven’t finished the story of the foundation.

Gaël : Yes.

Walid : I asked you when it was created, where it was created, and in what form. In fact, what I would have liked was for us to discuss the different evolutions a little. Since there have been quite notable developments over the years, I would have liked you to tell us a few words about them, please.

Gaël : So indeed, the foundation was created in 2004, in Delaware, as a 501.C6, a non-profit, like many foundations that exist in the United States. In 2006, we had our first person working in Europe. So quite quickly, we still had a presence in Europe. And along the way, in fact, in 2020, we moved the Eclipse Foundation to Brussels. Now, it’s called Eclipse Foundation AISBL for International Non-Profit Association. Today, we are the leading Open Source foundation with global visibility based in Europe.

Why is the association based in Belgium?

Walid : Why? What makes us move the foundation to Europe?

Gaël : Two reasons. look at our contributors and members. And we realized that two-thirds of our contributors and two-thirds of our members were European organizations and European developers. And then, Open Source has been on the rise in Europe for a few years. I think that’s something you could already feel in 2020. We identified the need to have an organization like the Eclipse Foundation based in Europe. And we thought it was an opportunity both for the foundation to differentiate itself from other players, and for us too, to support this movement, to have more deployments of Open Source in Europe.

Walid : Is the location of Belgium to be close to the European institutions? And because it’s the centre of Europe, why did you go, for example, to Belgium, and not to France or Germany, for example?

Gaël : Well, it’s not necessarily, initially, to be close to the European institutions. Afterwards, we can come back to it. It’s true that it’s interesting. today because there are a lot of things happening around Open Source at the European level and at the institutional level.

But in fact, we looked at the different places where we could create a foundation and it turns out that by construction, Belgium has this type of association called an International Non-Profit Association whose description and legal characteristics corresponded exactly to what we wanted to do. For example, if you set up an association in Germany, it is very difficult for a German association to spend money outside Germany. I don’t know if you’re already interested in the subject, but that’s the legal anecdote of the day. And so, an AISBL is just something that is exactly made for that.

And when we went through the different solutions, we said to ourselves, “wow, that’s what it’s for” and it made sense to incorporate.

Walid : Are there many Foundation employees in Europe now?

Gaël : First of all, the Foundation, overall, we have reached a size of 80 people today, more than half of whom are in Europe now. Knowing that we were talking earlier about the fact that we are remote, so that’s the case for us. We have a few employees in Brussels. Otherwise, we have people in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal. And we also have a few consultants who work for us in other countries. I like the idea that our team in Europe speaks at least a dozen European languages. It really makes us, by far, the most European foundation in this respect.

So, what do the people who work for the Eclipse Foundation do? There are people who, like me, go into contact with the members. There are people who take care of our servers, there are people who take care of our websites. We have a security team that is also important. We have people who manage intellectual property and then we have people who manage our processes because we were talking about it earlier, we like to have processes, but we also like to have people who allow, who help the community to set them up.

We have a lot of people who do marketing because it’s not always the primary talent of all open source developers to do marketing and so we need to promote the Eclipse foundation as such, but also to promote our different activities. And I was talking about this earlier, our various Working Groups. We have marketing specialists on each theme. We organize events too. Now, we have an event called Open Community Experience, for which this is the first session. So, I think that by the time you publish the podcast, it will be over. But since it starts next Monday, next Tuesday, sorry.

Walid : For sure, it will be over.

Gaël : It will have passed, yes.

Walid : Even if I’m fast, it will be over.

Gaël : exactly,

Walid : Yes. OK. Raphaël, do you have any questions?

Raphaël : No, no. I was going to ask that question. Yes, 80 people, there must be a lot of stuff done. And in fact, it illustrates what the foundation brings to the community or brings to the project. This means that a project that is starting up or entering into your incubation process, perhaps we will talk about incubation, can rely on these strengths to strengthen its image a little. I don’t know, find a logo. insert themselves into a marketing discourse that they have little or no control over.

Gaël : Yes, absolutely. Typically, the creation of a logo is a service that we offer to all projects that ask us for it. So, we also have graphic designers in-house. Sometimes, they are the ones who take care of it. Sometimes, we use logo crowdsourcing platforms. But yes, it’s never easy. coming up with Open Source project names and logo names is always something that’s a bit stupid.

Eclipse, the home of European digital sovereignty

Walid: I have a question. In fact, a while back, I listened to an interview with Mike Milikovic and in this interview that I’ll put in the description for people who are interested, he says something. He says that the foundation’s move to Europe, the goal too, was to see Eclipse as the place for European digital sovereignty. And that’s something that really appealed to me. I would have liked to know what he meant by that, actually. Can you tell us a little more about it?

Gaël : Yes, it’s an interesting subject. I don’t know to what extent you follow European policy, but what’s interesting is that in the last five years, basically, one of the important elements in Europe has been digital sovereignty. Thierry Breton was very involved in these themes.

And in fact, our positioning is to say, we’re here to help projects that aim at digital sovereignty, to help them structure themselves, to help them collaborate, to help them grow and eventually then to project these technologies elsewhere in the world. Since we moved to Europe, interestingly, we’ve had a lot of projects come to us because we’re an open source foundation based in Europe.

So we have two initiatives that I can talk about a little bit. We have the Eclipse Data Space Working Group, which is actually around the whole issue of managing data spaces on top of the cloud to choose how people can share their data, etc. We have one of the major projects, around which is called Eclipse Data Space Components, which is currently used in, I would say, 70 or 80% of the data spaces that are under construction. For example, Amadeus created one around tourism data. It was used during the Olympic Games (Editor’s note: Paris 2024) and is based on Eclipse Data Space Components. There is one called Catina-X in Germany that is for the entire automotive Supply Chain management part. It is also based on a project hosted at Eclipse called Tractus-X. And these are really problems. which are, so we recognize the X at the end, but suddenly, you’re going to tell me, and Gaia-X, we collaborate with Gaia-X and with the projects that have built services around the Gaia-X specifications.

Walid : Can you remind you for people who don’t know what Gaia-X is?

Gaël : Gaia-X is an association based in Brussels that aims to define good practices, labels, technical specifications, etc. for cloud governance that brings more portability, more interoperability and more sovereignty. OK. And so, this is a subject that was launched very strongly in 2019, I would say, by the German and French ministers of industry. And today, we are starting to see… relevant technology platforms. The idea of data spaces is really the idea that, in fact, European citizens create a lot of data that goes into clouds and that, in fact, making this data available in a controlled way will create new use cases that will allow the European economy to grow around that. So that’s an element on which, in terms of sovereignty, it’s one of the projects around the theme of sovereignty, Eclipse Data Space Working Group.

Another project is what we are doing in the automotive industry. We have an initiative called Eclipse SDV, for Software Defined Vehicle. In fact, the idea is major players in the automotive industry. So, we have Volkswagen, we have BMW, we have Mercedes and other players in the car manufacturers. And we have other players who are less European and we also have what is called in English is the Tier 1 so it must be the first tier suppliers, the first tier suppliers like Bosch, like Valeo in France like others, they all collaborate together around the idea that Software is eating the world so the software has eaten… to eat the world and eat the automobile too. And so, to meet these challenges, we need a software platform for the cars of tomorrow. And this software platform, a good idea, if we don’t want to waste energy, is to all collaborate to build the common areas in Open Source. And to have precisely these ideas of extensibility so that a BMW is always the atmosphere of a BMW, so that each manufacturer can add its atmosphere, its branding, and so that each first-tier supplier can package products that will be used by the different manufacturers. And so that’s also typically an initiative that came to us because we were an open source foundation established in Europe.

Raphaël : So you mean that it was the manufacturers who wanted to do coopetition, collaboration, who were looking for a framework to be able to do it and who said to themselves, hey, the Eclipse Foundation, that’s going to be good for that.

Gaël : The Eclipse Foundation is going to be good for that. They have processes that look solid and serious. They are based in Europe and they will help us build a global platform, but one that starts here. to develop it and push it to stay there.

Raphaël : Me, you know, I often see foundations as something that is central to creating an ecosystem. But this is even the next level. There are ecosystems that come to the foundation and say to themselves, this will help us to be an ecosystem.

Gaël : Also, one element in relation to this is that when large companies want to collaborate, there are several ways to do it. Sometimes they create a joint venture. But creating a Joint Venture is expensive. It lasts a long time. And in fact, what we’re proposing is an environment that is operational in a few weeks, that all major companies today know because they all consume Open Source. So at some point, their legal departments all broke their brains figuring out how it can work. On the other hand, this really allows them to collaborate while being compatible with antitrust rules, with non-competitiveness rules and all that.

The Eclipse Foundation and the standardization processes

Raphaël : |it’s interesting. And precisely, then maybe you will also talk about it with other activities such as IoT, etc. But who says extensible platform, ecosystem, collaboration, says standard. How does the foundation position itself in relation to this? Does it issue standards? Are you in contact with organizations that do standardization, perhaps at the European level? I don’t know.

Gaël : Yes, so that’s something we created in 2017. Since 2017, Java Enterprise Edition has come to the Eclipse Foundation. Before, it was managed by the Java Community Process. It was managed by Oracle directly. At some point, there was… The same story a little bit, the different partners wanted to find a neutral place to collaborate. But the novelty was not just an Open Source project, in this case there is GlassFish, but it was also to have specifications.

And so to have more than 40 specifications, because when you look at Java EE, there are more than 40 specifications, there are profiles, there are all that. And so in fact, in 2017, 2018, 2019, when all this came to the Eclipse Foundation, we created what we call the Eclipse Foundation Specification Process, which is a way of creating specifications together, while being as open source as possible, that is to say that all the artifacts are open source during the entire time of the development of the specifications. And we manage to have the various industrial players around the table who come to collaborate to create a spec. Knowing that a spec at Eclipse is a document, APIs, one or more reference implementations that must be available in Open Source, and a test compatibility kit, which is in fact a test set that allows any implementation to verify that it corresponds to the specification. So that’s the creation of the Eclipse Foundation Specification Process. And in fact, it allowed us at some point to have in the IoT also the definition of… of a standardized spec in particular. The first one we did was Sparkplug. Sparkplug is a project to connect machine tools with MQTT. Basically, guys say that MQTT is good, but we need behind MQTT to define the message payload and standardize the message payload a bit. And so, they came to create a specification project at Eclipse. And for the first time, we wanted to make it an international standard. Today, we have established a collaboration with ISO/IOC, where we are what is called NOT Submitter. PAS stands for Publicly Available Specification. We are able to submit specifications to ISO that are publicly available and that have been defined publicly. So it works very well with this process that we had created previously. We created a collaboration to reach a consensus, to create a specification. And then, we pushed this specification to become an international standard.

We were talking about Data Space earlier. In Data Space, we have Eclipse Data Space Transport Protocol, which is actually following this path. It’s a spec that has been submitted to the Eclipse Foundation, and in fact that we’re going to take to ISO/IEC to standardize it, to standardize how data spaces can communicate with each other, even if they come from different technologies.

One element I would like to add on this is that perhaps when I talk about it, we have the impression that we are only doing things with large companies. We work with large companies, but I was telling you earlier that I had a stint at Obeo, we also have a lot of SMEs that collaborate within the Eclipse Foundation. What I like about SMEs is that they are super reactive and that, in general, they bring ideas, they shake up the established order a little.

We also do everything possible to ensure that individuals and individual developers can participate in all our activities. So, a developer who wants to participate in an Eclipse project, all Eclipse projects, they are open, transparent, meritocratic. And contributions are open to everyone. Therefore, any individual, regardless of affiliation, can contribute to a project. Then, we also put in place mechanisms so that an individual can contribute to these famous specifications which will then become standards. And that’s something that is really close to our hearts in the foundation team. Of course, large companies have a significant strike force, but we also know that on Open Source, SMEs, talented individual developers can have a huge impact.

The main projects hosted by the Eclipse Foundation

Walid : What are the main projects that are hosted by the foundation?

Gaël : We have more than 430 projects. For example, Jetty is a project of the Eclipse Foundation. Raphael, help me. What is Red Hat’s project? Green.x. Ah!

Raphaël : Yes.

Gaël : Vert.x is also a project of the Eclipse Foundation. It’s projects around Java. And in fact, we have four pillars, a little, of activities. We have everything related to Java activities. I was talking about Jakarta EE. We also have Adoptium. We have Temurin who is today. And we have… more than 20 million downloads per month on Temurin, which is definitely the most used Java runtime, in my opinion, lately. Around Java, we also put MicroProfile, which was pushed a few years ago in parallel with Jakarta and which continues. It’s a whole part of the project around the theme of the Java theme.

We have IoT projects, Edge, etc. I was telling you about everything around Mosquitto. But we also have, for example, tools to manage fleets of devices (Editor’s note: MDM, Mobile Device Management). We have projects to manage Digital Twins , such as Ditto, for example. We have a project to make gateways, like Kura, which allows us to build an IoT gateway. I have already told you about the automotive sector.

Then we have our development tools. In the development tools, we have the Eclipse IDE. which is experiencing a resurgence of interest from companies that have created products around it and are in the process of modernizing the Eclipse IDE. It’s a colleague who is based in France too, who manages it, it’s Thomas Froment. Eventually, on occasion, it may be worth it when these actions have succeeded in interviewing him. But around the tools, we also… tools in the cloud.

So, we have Eclipse TEA, we have OpenVSX, which is actually a marketplace of VS Code extensions. TEA is compatible with VS Code extensions and it turns out that Microsoft’s plugin marketplace only allows deployment in VS Code. And so, in fact, we created our own marketplace that is accessible to everyone and contains plugins. available so that people who don’t use VS Code but want to use certain plugins can download these different plugins.

Eclipse Thread X

Gaël: We have a new one that’s not bad too, it’s called Eclipse ThreadX. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, Raphael?

Raphaël : Is it to implement threads? No? given the name…

Gaël : no, it’s not to implement threads. It is a Real-time Operating System (RTOS).

Raphaël : Oh yes, it was a gift of…

Gaël : It was at Microsoft at one point. Microsoft had bought it and they decided to open source it last year. But what’s super interesting about ThreadX is that it was an Operating System certified for use contexts, including safety. So, it’s ISO 26262 certified, etc. I’m not sure if it’s ISO 26262, but hey. It is certified for safety use contexts. What I like about this project is that for more than ten years, I’ve always heard people tell me “actually, open source and security can’t really work”. Or “open source and safety, it can’t really work”. And so, what I think is good is that we build the processes to help all the developers of open source projects at Eclipse to reach the best level in terms of security in their development. And in parallel to that, we have a project like ThreadX which is certified by TUV and which, in fact, is open source, which continues to be certified by TUV by being open source.

Walid : What is the TUV?

Gaël : TUV, you know, you have Veritas in France and sometimes, when you buy stuff, you have a TUV label on it, T-U-V. It’s the people who certify in Germany. So, you have several. In this case, I don’t know which one it is. But hey, it’s not a big deal. And in fact, they certify. that this project has a sufficient level of safety for certain use cases, particularly in the automotive industry or otherwise.

Walid : So now, Microsoft, they’re transferring ownership of the code they’ve produced to the foundation. They continue to be contributors. How does it go, in fact, from there?

Gaël : In fact, it was a project that they had bought. They used it on Azure. It was… It was a real-time Operating System available on Azure (Azure RTOS). And in fact, they changed their strategy. And me, all my life, I’ve heard people tell me: “Open source is a bitnik thing, it’s impossible”. And what we’re putting in place are processes that respect our principles of openness, collaboration, transparency, etc. But which will also respect the principles that make it possible to achieve these certifications for critical environments. Because in fact, I’ve always been convinced that this was the case, but I find it super exciting to do it in real life. That is to say… Basically, when you do certification processes like what TUV does, in fact, what you’re saying is that you’ve defined requirements, you’ve defined requirements and you’re able to show that, in fact, your product implements those requirements. So, you have a lot of emphasis on the traceability of requirements and all that. There’s nothing stopping you from doing this in open source. Just, you have to say, there you go, if you contribute to our project, you can contribute. But in fact, when you contribute, you have to come up with the requirements that you meet and you explain, that you have documented how the patch you bring meets the requirement and what tests verify that the requirement is in place. And that’s pretty awesome actually.

Walid : I want to dig a little deeper into this point because I find it very interesting. So Microsoft decides that this is no longer their strategy.

Gaël : Yes.

Walid : They decide to open source the code and transfer the ownership of the code and the management of the project to the Eclipse Foundation. So now, in fact, it means that Microsoft, they decide not to necessarily contribute too much to this anymore. So in fact, your objective is to make the project sustainable. And so, it’s to go and advertise this project to your members and the community in general so that people reappropriate the project and use it and make it grow. Is that right?

Gaël : Yes, absolutely. In fact, it’s to actually have users and contributors who want to keep the project alive. But it’s often a…

So, just for the sake of detail, is that in fact, Microsoft doesn’t give away the intellectual property because when someone brings a project to Eclipse, effectively, they transfer the management of the project and the way of managing the community to Eclipse. In fact, each contributor to a project at Eclipse retains the intellectual property on their contributions. That’s an important point.

But the life of a project, life, the difficulties of a project and the fact that a project is starting up again, it’s something we see every day. For example, I don’t know if… I’m sure Raphael remembers Birt. B-I-R-T, Eclipse BIRT. And in fact, Birt was a project that was done by a company called Actuate, which was selling, which had a software offer around it, with services. So, they had Birt which was a project at Eclipse, and then they had an Actuate platform, I don’t know what, etc. And at some point, they were bought out by a bigger company that was itself bought out. And at the end of the second acquisition, etc., the guys who were contributing to the open source part, we told them, “yes, well… No, we have other things for you to do now.” So, for a few years, the project that had been hugely successful and was being used in a lot of places, it was a tool to generate Birt PDFs. I think it’s still used in a number of places, in my opinion.

For a few years, the project was a little delayed. And one day, we had members of the community who came to see us and said… yes, so we have a problem, which is that Birt doesn’t compile with the latest version of Java, and we need it to compile with the latest version of Java, etc. We said “Ok, no problem, you’re motivated, you have resources, we’re going to reboot the project with you”. And in fact, what we did was we launched a call on the mailing list to say “There you go, we’re rebooting this project, which is a dysfunctional project because there is no more activity, people haven’t made the necessary corrections: raise your hand if you’re interested”. And so we had former contributors who continued to be contributors. We had new people come. So, I’m not going to lie to you, it’s not the most active project we have, but it’s a project that now keeps up with updates, updates its dependencies when there’s a dependency to update or things like that. And I like this story because it’s a project that had… You know, I remember when…

When I was working at France Telecom at the time, we had the idea that basically, a proprietary project, a proprietary product, had a lifespan of 5 years. And that in general, by the time we’re really done deploying it, we had to move on to the next version. Whereas here, with an open source project like this, it’s a project that has been… created in 2008 perhaps, something like that, and which today is still active. And people can still use it to do what it was designed to do, it was designed.

How does a project join the Eclipse Foundation?

Walid : There is a part there that we haven’t talked about, it’s how a project comes in, and what does it take for a project to enter the foundation?

Gaël : Eclipse? That’s going to be fast. That’s good given that time is ticking.

In fact, in our values, there is one that we don’t choose the winners. And somehow, we have quite few limits on the projects. One of the few limitations is that it must still be in a subject that is more or less close to topics relevant to the Eclipse Foundation. But honestly, to create a project at the Eclipse Foundation, there is a two-page form to fill out. We have to respect a process which is that we publish the proposal after it has been reviewed internally by us.

We publish it for comment for two weeks and after two weeks, it’s between two and three weeks because we do this on a fixed date, we will adopt the project and we will create its GitHub repo or its GitLab repo. We will provide them with the elements they need to collaborate. And then, on the other hand, we wait for … the projects that join the Eclipse Foundation, they respect the rules we have defined in terms of collaboration and in terms of following our processes.

Walid : who is ON?

Gaël : ON is the staff of the Eclipse Foundation. So typically, project proposals are reviewed mainly by two colleagues. Wayne Beaton, who is our director in charge of open source projects. And Mike Milinkovitch, who is the executive director, who is actually always the one who will review a project proposal before it is published.

Raphaël : So I have a question, because this is the entry into the foundation, and then there is the notion of incubator, and in particular how do you get out of the incubator?

Gaël : That’s an interesting question. The incubator, it doesn’t say that the project is mature or not mature. The incubator, he says, the people who are doing the project have understood how the processes of the Eclipse Foundation work. They have understood that you have to be transparent, that is to say that at the beginning of a cycle, you have to say what you intend to do for the next release, that when you want to make a release, it’s not just you compile and put the binary. You have to have made release notes, you have to plan a release review and you have to have consulted the community to make sure that everyone understands what you’re going to release.

Raphaël : Okay. So, in fact, it’s clear that they have understood and that they apply the principles, the Eclipse way, you know.

Gaël : exactly, it’s, yes, absolutely, it’s The Eclipse Way

Raphaël : OK, okay. yes, that’s interesting. I thought there was a really notion of maturity, of saying, yes, the project, it’s mature, we can release it, etc. But the project is mature in the sense that it is compatible with the Eclipse.

Gaël : yes, so sometimes, you have projects that come to us that are already mature and then you have some that are, that may never be mature in terms of feature, I mean. But what interests us is to check that they have understood how the processes work, that they are comfortable with the processes and that they are able to carry them out. Then, it is the community that will choose the projects that work well.

Walid : Any project that comes up goes through the incubator?

Gaël : Yes, any project that arrives starts in incubation. In general, if you look enough in the docs, I think they are advised to start in a 0.7 version. The idea is that we’ve already done things, that we’re not going to 0.0 or 0.1, and that in fact, we’re giving ourselves the idea of doing three releases before making a 1.0, which should be a first mature version, but which is also the time when we’re going to try to graduate outside the incubator.

The collaboration between Eclipse and other foundations

Walid : There are two games left, we’ll try to go pretty fast. The next part, what interested me, was to know what was the place and the collaboration that we could have at the Eclipse Foundation with other foundations. Are there already collaborations with other foundations? And in fact, how does it go a little?

Gaël : What I wanted to talk to you about, so the link with other foundations. So, with the different foundations, already, we still cross paths quite regularly. We meet at FOSDEM, for example. You see that you have the t-shirt.

Walid : yes

Gaël : We meet in many places. Depending on the configurations, there is collaboration, sometimes a little competition, etc. But there is one project that I have not talked about so far. which we have just launched called the Open Regulatory Compliance Working Group. So I admit that the name is not super sexy, but the subject is super important. And why do I want to talk about it now? Because in fact it’s a subject in which we have a very strong collaboration with the other foundations. First of all, I’ll tell you what it’s all about. The Open Regulatory Compliance Working Group is an open source initiative to collaborate on the challenges of the CRA, and therefore the Cyber Resilience Act, and other regulations that are being put in place at the European level, whether it is the AI Act, the PLD for Product Liability Directive, etc.

And in fact, something new is that until now, the European institutions and others didn’t know that we existed. They weren’t too interested in the software already and they didn’t necessarily know that open source existed.

But in fact, recently, that is to say for the past two years, there has not been a single European regulation project that does not mention software. There is not a European regulatory project around software that does not mention open source. Often, to say, oh yes, if you’re doing open source, you’re exempt.

For example, in the AI Acts, there is a line that says open source models are exempt, etc. But in fact, what does it mean to be open source from the point of view of European regulations? And so, that’s all we address in Open Regulatory Compliance. And in fact, to address that, we invited all the open source foundations to the table. So, we have the Apache Foundation, we have FreeBSD, we have OpenInfra, we have OWASP, we have Python, we have people who do Rust, we have Ruby, we have Blender, we have The Document Foundation, PHP, Matrix, and we are working on welcoming even more. And in fact, together, we’re going to define how, particularly in the CRA, what services open source foundations should provide around projects in terms of managing security vulnerabilities, in terms of potentially supply chain management as well, SBOM management, you were talking about it earlier.

And also in terms of attestation, that is to say that for example in the CRA, it says that manufacturers, so people who put software on the market, must ensure that the software components, open source or not, that they integrate into their products do not have any existing security flaws and that each software component they integrate is well managed in terms of good security practices. What we do is we collaborate with the open source foundations to create the processes to allow the foundations to provide the best practices so that each of the projects can be up to speed in terms of managing security vulnerabilities and can also be up to speed and for example provide attestations that product developers can have confidence in this component and in the processes that are put in place around this component.

It’s something quite new to have such collaboration within foundations and it’s really finally the arrival of new regulations that lead us to collaborate more together.

Raphaël : It’s interesting because in fact, Eclipse is a foundation, it manages projects. But as we have seen, there is this process part, you are a bit of a factory, a process supernova. Even for the open source community at large. Excuse me!

Gaël : Exactly.

Raphaël : yes, it’s interesting.

Setting up a European Open Source lobby

Walid : And the fact of having this grouping and therefore having an additional weight, the goal is also to be able to be… Are they no longer heard at the level of the European institutions?

Gaël : So that’s an interesting point. In fact, institutions realize that open source exists and represents a huge part of the software. It is estimated that it is about 80% of apps, etc. But also say, it’s not easy to communicate with the open source ecosystem. So we, recently, hired a specialist, someone who has previously worked as a lobbyist for large companies and who comes to help us build the relationship with the institutions. And we’re not the only ones, the Open Source Initiative has also hired people who specialize in public policy, because it’s important.

The thing is, if as an open source community, we’re not good at getting our ideas across, if we don’t speak the right language, and the language I speak today, it’s not the language we should use when we go… in Brussels or even in Paris to talk to the government. So if we don’t speak the right language, our ideas, our options, etc. will not be understood.

Walid : It’s about lobbying to defend our interests.

Gaël : Exactly. There are a lot of explanations, a lot of monitoring, knowing what is going to happen to us next time and then being able to make proposals. And here, for example, on Open Regulatory Compliance, we have a vocation to use what I described earlier to make open specifications and to propose them for European standardization or to propose them for the European Commission to possibly integrate or reference them in the CRA practice guides.

The future of the Eclipse Foundation

Walid : The last part, you’re talking about it here, which I wanted us to address, was a bit about the future of the Foundation, that is to say what are the main areas of development in the future of the Foundation?

Gaël : I think we talked about it quite a bit. There is this subject around positioning oneself as a trusted partner, a serious and trusted partner for institutions and for different companies of all sizes.

Me, even on a personal level, that’s really what interests me. I think open source is a really good way to collaborate. I don’t think that everything should be open source because each company potentially needs to be able to create its products, etc. But on the other hand, I tend to think that the more we collaborate around open source platforms, around open source projects, etc., the better.

In my role, what I try to push is the idea that Europe needs to do more open source because in fact, when you look, we still have a lot of uses in Europe. At some point, if we use technologies that are more but we don’t create our own open source technologies enough, but in fact we use the technologies created by others.

And so this is one of the elements, for example, that my colleague in charge of public policy and I are trying to push is that in fact the Americans use open source very well as a vector for the propagation of their technology. It’s something they’ve mastered for a very, very long time. The Chinese formalized the idea that open source was important to them. So there are documents from the Chinese government that explain how China should use open source as a vehicle for the adoption of these technologies. And I think we really need to do the same thing in Europe, which is to trust our developers, push our developers, give them the means to develop the open source platforms we need. Because there is a step further than being the best at setting up existing platforms. We have great cases in Europe and in France itself, there is Probable which was created not long ago to market Scikit-Learn and set up business around Scikit-Learn. It’s a great example because it’s an open source platform that we created, which is used all over the world, which is used in almost all AI deployments and which in fact behind it is real leadership. After that, we have to find a way to create business around it. I like that idea.

Conclusion

Walid : Listen, that seems to me to be a beautiful conclusion full of future. I don’t know, Raphaël, do you still have questions or not?

Raphaël : Not today. I think we’ll have to have a new discussion on the AI part, Gen AI and all that, because I’ve seen that there are projects a little bit in the foundation that are starting to arrive and all that, but that’s another subject.

Walid : I think we’ll end there. Listen, Gaël, thank you very much for all these explanations. I think we could have talked for a very long time because I still had a lot of questions, but I think that… If the listeners have questions and have appreciated it, we may do more episodes. I keep things under my belt. Listen, thank you very much. So, for the listeners, if you liked it, as usual, I invite you to share the episode, because it’s important that these episodes are filmed there, that they are discovered by more people. This is really important. And then, don’t hesitate to make comments: it feels good when there are comments from people who tell us what is good, what is not good, what they would have liked to listen to, etc. It gives a lot of ideas and it’s really nice I like it a lot so thank you very much Gaël and then Gaël and Raphaël thank you very much, see you soon and for those who have the chance to go to the Open Source Experience show I think we will all be able to meet there that’s it.

Gaël : see you soon thank you very much,

Raphaël : see you soon, thank you. Hello!

This episode was recorded on October 14, 2024.

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