Open source consortium Eclipse Foundation Wednesday rounded out its
12-member board of directors with four new members. The appointments put the
finishing touches on a reorganization that began
several months ago in an effort to bring the group closer to end users.
Joining the software development tools group are: Eclipse Project Lead John
Wiegand, of IBM; Todd Williams, of Genuitec, Rich Main, of SAS; and Bjorn
Freeman-Benson of the University of Washington.
The newly elected members, who will represent Eclipse’s Open Source project
community and commercial supporters, join the eight strategic members who
were elected along with the reorganized group’s unveiling
at the EclipseCon developer forum in Anaheim, Calif., last month.
Those directors are: Ericsson’s Ronald Ingman; HP’s Michael J. Rank; IBM’s
Dave Thomson; Intel’s Jonathan Khazam; Jim Ready of MontaVista Software; Dan
Dodge of QNX Software Systems; Michael Bechauf, of SAP AG; and Boris
Kapitanski, of Serena Software.
The Eclipse board was installed following months of reorganization planning
aimed at killing the perception that IBM
ruled the consortium, a sentiment that in part
stems from IBM’s $40 million investment when the consortium launched in
2001.
Eclipse has now made it clear that it’s a not-for-profit organization, in a bid
to entice reticent vendors, such as Sun Microsystems, to
join.
Sun, which is developing its own tools platform NetBeans, has repeatedly declined to
join Eclipse and repeatedly invited Eclipse to join the NetBeans
organization. IBM recently invited
Sun to create a project to make Java open source, but the Santa Clara,
Calif. concern laughed off the suggestion.
Eclipse spokeswoman Barbara Stewart told internetnews.com the new
directors took longer to elect than the previous leaders because Eclipse
members were required to vote on them. The other appointees are strategic
directors chosen based on their contributions to the Eclipse development
platform, a Java-based software architecture developers are free to use to
create software tools.
All of the directors are responsible for planning the group’s strategy,
commercial development and software development roadmaps.
“This will be a critical year for the Eclipse Foundation as we strive to
move from an organization that is focused primarily on the development
community to one that is an increasingly attractive option for end-user
consumers, as well,” said Rich Main, director of Java development
environments at SAS, in a public statement.
