Coinciding with today's opening of EclipseCon Europe in Ludwigsburg, Germany, Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich has welcomed Google as a new strategic member of the open source organisation. The Foundation is responsible for operating the open source Eclipse development environment and various associated projects. As a strategic member, Google will provide the organisation with eight full-time developers to work on Eclipse technology and donate $250,000 per year.

Other strategic members contributing the same sum are CA Technologies, IBM, Oracle and SAP. Membership will provide Google with a representative on the Eclipse Foundation's steering and control committee – which also includes members from Actuate, Bredex, EclipseSource, itemis, OBEO and Talend – and a say in Eclipse's strategic direction.

The company's involvement in the Eclipse community is not new. It had long been an Eclipse Foundation Gold Sponsor. Google staff have also frequently collaborated as committers on a range of Eclipse projects and developed tools for the Eclipse platform to improve support for Google projects such as the Android SDK, AppEngine, GWT and Dart. Google projects such as WindowBuilder and CodePro Profiler have also previously been adopted as Eclipse projects. In September, Google also contributed $20,000 to the Foundation to purchase hardware to help performance testing of the Eclipse IDE.

(crve)