Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

When companies or individuals work alone, they can achieve results that are limited to their experience and expertise. However, when companies or individuals collaborate with a variety of industry players and experts, they gain new insights and access to extensive expertise, which greatly improves the bottom line for everyone. The same is true in the open source sector, where small and large member organizations benefit from collaboration.

At the Eclipse Foundation, working groups provide strategic direction for organizations in the development of open source technologies. Here, members not only take advantage of swarm intelligence, but can align on common technical and business interests and work together to develop a vision for open source software development that moves everyone forward. 

To this end, the Eclipse Foundation provides services, governance, and resources - effectively an organizational superstructure that allows working groups to maintain a strong focus on technology and innovation goals while continuing to grow and diversify.

Working groups are a venue for strategic direction of open source technologies, where companies from different industries come together to promote a common interest, support an area such as the automotive industry, or work on specification development in a vendor-neutral manner.

These collaborative ecosystems complement the work that software developers do to enable open enterprise collaboration and innovation. Companies with broad technology interests, such as SAP, often join multiple working groups, creating new opportunities for collaboration across technology areas and industry focus.

To ensure that everyone benefits equally from this form of collaboration, a governance charter defines the scope, goals, and vision of each working group. A working group creates a level playing field where no person or organization has special status or veto power, regardless of the size of the organization or the number of its developers involved in open source projects. Working groups operate under a vendor-neutral management model and established antitrust and copyright guidelines. These ensure that all open source software developed can be used by all.

A current example: At the beginning of June, the Eclipse Foundation established the Eclipse IDE Working Group. Its goal is to ensure the continued development, adoption and sustainability of the Eclipse IDE product suite, associated technologies and ecosystem. The new working group, whose founding members include Bosch, IBM and SAP, is focused on providing governance, guidance and funding to the communities that support the deployment and maintenance of the Eclipse IDE and related open source products.

SAP is known to many through the development, distribution and support of its various enterprise software applications. Less well known, however, is that SAP has achieved much of this development as a regular user and supporter of open source software.

SAP is a strategic founding member of the Eclipse Foundation, supporting and contributing to various projects and participating in a total of three working groups: Eclipse IoT, which develops commercial IoT solutions; Eclipse Cloud Development Tools; and, of course, Eclipse IDE. Accordingly, the company is heavily involved in the Eclipse community.