[Eclipse]: How open-source projects get funded?

Question

While using Aptana and Eclipse for the first time in my programming life for PHP projects, I am wondering how these projects get funded. There is a lot of activity in the Eclipse community and the IDE itself is very good. I came across various Eclipse IDE sites and I am not able to 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 is already out there.

How the full-time and part-time programmers get funded in these projects? I came to know that Aptana has withdrawn it's PHP support. Will Eclipse continue supporting PHP?

Answer 1

They outsource everything to offshore cubicles.

Answer 2

The homepage of the eclipse project is http://www.eclipse.org.

As to the funding: some programmers are paid (for example by IBM which originally started the eclipse project, or companies that use Eclipse as part of their own product or strategy), and as with almost all open-source projects a lot of programmers really just work in their free time on a part. Eclipse consists of a rather small core, and a lot of plugins, which are all developed by different individuals.

Answer 3

Often projects like this are simply people with an interest giving their own time, sweat and tears to produce great software.

Some bigger ones (Mozilla Foundation) form non-profit organisations and may get donations. Mozilla gets millions of $s through their referral to Google in their search bar - every search from that to google counts for cash.

Very occasionally it's in a company's benefit to produce something open source and even pay their workers to work on it. Take Google Chrome for example. It makes sense for Google to make their browser, and indeed pay their employees for it. But to keep people trusting them, and to allow for other developers to play and add to it, they've released the source code in the Chromium project, and anyone can download, compile and use that.

In regards to Aptana - that's a company, and they write open source free plugins to Eclipse etc so that people can write for and use their products. It makes sense for them to contribute as they'll get something back. I can't see any reference to them pulling their support though, but you may well have better sources.

Hope that helps!

Answer 4

From the Eclipse "About" page:

The Eclipse Foundation is funded by annual dues from our members and governed by a Board of Directors. Strategic Developers and Strategic Consumers hold seats on this Board, as do representatives elected by Add-in Providers and Open Source committers. The Foundation employs a full-time professional staff to provide services to the community but does not employ the open source developers, called committers, which actually work on the Eclipse projects. Eclipse committers are typically employed by organizations or are independent developers that volunteer their time to work on an open source project.

Support for various languages in Eclipse is through Plugins. There are a number of plugins to provide PHP coding support.

Aptana on the other hand is a for profit company spun out of the Eclipse code base. I believe their current business model is selling hosting and support. They used to sell a "pro" edition of the editor, but I can't seem to find that anymore.

Answer 5

Open source projects get funded because the companies and individuals involved believe that it is in their best interests. For some, it is a matter of building reputation so that they can sell services in other contexts. Some companies fund the Eclipse Foundation in exchange for goodwill, business opportunities, advertising, and whatnot.

Pragmatically, creating and running an open source project is a good way of bring like-minded individuals together to share a development burden. Much of what is created at Eclipse, for example, is infrastructure and frameworks upon which applications can be be built. If you think about it, most of the software we use contains tonnes of functionality that you only really care about if it isn't there. You probably don't use Eclipse because of the fantastic component model (OSGi referenced implementation), or the ability to stack views, manage editors, workbench, etc. However, if all those things weren't there, you probably wouldn't use Eclipse. In general, it's probably the case that upwards of 80% of the functionality in any given application just isn't all that interesting unless it's not there. Some 80% of functionality is "plumbing". So instead of having a dozen separate organizations each spend time and money building infrastructure/plumbing that the end user only cares about if it isn't there, these companies come together in open source to work together on those shared bits of infrastructure that they ultimately use to compete against each other in the marketplace. They do it in open source so as to invite additional like-minded organizations to participate.

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

Some organizations bet their business on the technology. Eclipse RCP, for example, is used by--literally--hundreds of organizations to deliver applications. If an organization depends so much on a technology, it makes sense to invest time, energy, and money in it to make sure that it continues to exist and grow.

Here's an article that I found interesting:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505%5F3-10387512-16.html?tag=mncol;title

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