Eclipse is branching out. The organization is now inviting small open source projects into its Labs effort, offering a home and promotion among the community without requiring them to adhere to all the rules of the Eclipse Foundation.
Instead, Eclipse is offering a specific set of guidelines for the Labs environment, and also expects participating projects to follow the Google Code Project Hosting terms of use.
Developer.com has the story on the launch of Eclipse Labs.
Ever since its creation, Eclipse has been a home for official open source projects that operate under its guidelines. Eclipse is now expanding beyond the confines of its own project structure with its new Eclipse Labs effort, which enables anyone to create their own open source Eclipse ecosystem project.
Participation in Eclipse Labs does not mean that an open source project is an official Eclipse project. Instead, Labs is a place for smaller efforts that could potentially grow to become official projects in the future. The new effort could help to grow the Eclipse ecosystem, which is already home to Java development, tooling and runtime projects. In 2009, over 33 Eclipse projects had releases as part of the Foundation annual “release train” cycle.
“The intention is to provide a place for Eclipse-oriented open source projects that do not need or want the rigor of the Eclipse Foundation policies and procedures,” Ian Skerrett, director of marketing at the Eclipse Foundation, told InternetNews.com. “That being said, there are a set of Eclipse Labs Guidelines and the Google Code Project Hosting terms of use that we would expect all projects to follow.”
