Microsoft is now a Strategic Member of the Eclipse Foundation

Back in 2016, Microsoft joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Solutions Member, and announced many tools and services for the Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It also open sourced its Team Explorer plugin for Eclipse and you can still find it on GitHub here - even though the project is not maintained anymore. Today, Microsoft has announced that it is expanding its partnership to become a Strategic Member at the Eclipse Foundation.

For those unaware, the Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit organization that governs the Eclipse open source community. It places special emphasis on the development of ecosystems, IP management, infrastructure, and development. It has hundreds of members including Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, and IBM at its helm.

With Microsoft now being a Strategic Member at the Eclipse Foundation, the company is mandated to provide dedicated developers and resources who spend effort to evolve the Eclipse technology. Furthermore, Stephen Walli, who is the Principal Program Manager at the Azure Office of the CTO, will be joining the foundation's board of directors since each Strategic Member has to nominate a representative for the board.

Walli went on to say that:

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.

Microsoft is already actively involved in several Eclipse projects such as Adoptium, which is a work group tasked with promoting and supporting runtimes for Java applications. The company is also looking forward to participating in other initiatives such as Eclipse Dataspace Connector and Eclipse Tractus-X.