[Eclipse]: How are open source projects funded?

Question

When using Aptana and Eclipse for the first time in my life programming for PHP projects, I wonder how these projects are funded. There is a lot of activity in the Eclipse community, and the IDE itself is very good. I stumbled upon various Eclipse IDE sites and I cannot decide which one is the official site of the Eclipse project. There is also news that the community is also working on dynamic language integration, and one Aptana product already exists.

How do full-time and part-time programmers get funding for these projects? I found out that Aptana has withdrawn support for PHP. Will Eclipse support PHP?

Answer 1

From Eclipse's “About Page” :

The Eclipse Foundation is funded by annual contributions from our members and managed by the Board of Directors. Strategic developers and strategic Consumers have a place on this board because the representatives selected by the add-on are Open Source Providers and Committers. The foundation uses full-time professional staff to provide services to the community, but does not use open-source developers who are actually working on Eclipse Projects. Combined Eclipse is typically used by or independent developers who volunteer their time to work on an open source project.

Support for various languages ​​in Eclipse is via plugins. There are a number of plugins to provide PHP encoding support .

Aptana, on the other hand, is a nonprofit company derived from the Eclipse code base. I believe that their current business model sells hosting and support. They used the editor’s pro edition for sale, but I can’t find it anymore.

Answer 2

Eclipse project homepage http://www.eclipse.org .

As for financing: some programmers pay (for example, IBM, which originally launched the eclipse project, or companies that use Eclipse as part of their own product or strategy) and, like almost all open source projects, programmers really just work in free time from work. Eclipse consists of a fairly small kernel and many plugins that are developed by different people.

Answer 3

Open source projects receive funding because the companies and individuals involved consider this to be in their interest. For some, it is a matter of building a reputation so that they can sell services in other contexts. Some companies fund the Eclipse Foundation in exchange for goodwill, business opportunities, advertising, and more.

Pragmatically creating and launching an open source project is a good way to bring like-minded people together to share the development burden. For example, much of what is created in Eclipse is the infrastructure and the infrastructure on which applications can be created. If you think about it, most of the software we use contains tons of functionality that you really like if you don’t. You are probably not using Eclipse because of the fantastic component model (OSGi-specific implementation), or the ability to stack views, manage editors, workbench, etc. However, if all these things were not, you probably would not use Eclipse. In general, the fact is likely that more than 80% of the functionality in any given application is simply not that interesting, unless that is the case. About 80% of the functionality is plumbing. Therefore, instead of having a dozen separate organizations, everyone spends time and money creating infrastructure / plumbing that the end user only cares about not being there, these companies are combined in open source code to collaborate on these shared bits of infrastructure that they are ultimately to compete with each other in the market. They do this open source to invite other organizations that are unanimous in their participation.

Other organizations are involved in open source to help develop the market. If you think of all the millions of people who just use Eclipse. If a small number of them decide to buy a useful plug-in or two, this can turn into a good business.

Some organizations are betting on this technology. For example, Eclipse RCP is used by literally hundreds of organizations to deliver applications. If an organization is so dependent on technology, it makes sense to invest time, energy and money in it so that it continues to exist and grow.

Here is an article I found interesting:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10387512-16.html?tag=mncol;title

There are other reasons, but these are some of my favorites.

Answer 4

Often such projects are simply people with interest giving their own time, sweat and tears to create great software.

Some larger ones (Mozilla Foundation) form non-profit organizations and may receive donations. Mozilla receives millions of $ s through their referral to Google in its search bar - every search from this to Google is calculated for cash.

It is very rare for a company to create something open source and even pay for the work of its employees. Take Google Chrome, for example. For Google, it makes sense to make your own browser and really pay your employees for it. But so that people trust them and allow other developers to play and add to them, they released the source code in the Chromium project, and everyone can download, compile and use it.

As for Aptana, it's a company, and they write free open source plugins for Eclipse, etc., so that people can write and use their products. It makes sense for them to contribute, as they will return something. I do not see any reference to them, supporting their support, but you may have better sources.

Hope this helps!

Answer 5

They transfer everything to offshore offices.