1. On making standards
organizations and open source
communities work hand in hand
Benjamin Cabé, Eclipse Foundation
@kartben - benjamin@eclipse.org
IEEE Open Source event
Austin, TX – May 20, 2016

2. Agenda
➔ What is the Eclipse Foundation?
➔ Eclipse Working Groups
➔ Keys to a successful standard
➔ Case studies / Success stories
◆ LWM2M
◆ MQTT

3. Eclipse Foundation

4. Eclipse History
● Launched by IBM in 2001
○ Initial release of the Eclipse technology platform
(Platform, JDT, PDE)
○ Founding consortium board comprised Borland, IBM,
Red Hat……
● Eclipse Foundation formed in 2004
○ Independent not-for-profit organization formed in
2004
○ Definition of bylaws, membership model, initial IP
process

5. Eclipse at a glance
● Organization
○ 501(c)6 not-for-profit, USA (Delaware) incorporated,
headquarters in Ottawa, Canada
● License
○ Eclipse Public License is the default
○ Other licenses possible by approval of the Board
● Focus areas
○ Most project implementations are in Java, but moving
into web (JavaScript), C/C++, …
○ “Eclipse plug-in model”
○ Development tools, modeling tools, runtimes, web

6. ● $5.0 million annual budget
● ~250 members (13 strategic)
● 25 staff
● 75 events per year
● 7 collaborative working groups
Eclipse Foundation by the Numbers

7. ● 300+ projects (50+ new in past 12
months)
● 130 MLOC/year code change velocity
● ~1200 committers
● 9 million active users of Eclipse IDE
○ Leading IDE in Java, C/C++, PHP, …
● 1.5 million downloads/month (average)
● 2.4 million unique visitors/month
Eclipse Community by the Numbers

8. The members of Eclipse
● 250+ members
○ 13 Strategic Members
● 1200 committers, representing 60+
organizations
Strategic members:

9. Governance
IP Mgt
Projects &
Process
Licensing
Model
Infra-structure
Community
&
Ecosystem
Foundation Services

10. Eclipse Development Process
● Proven process for creating
successful open source
projects and communities
● Open, Transparent,
Meritocratic
● Vendor-neutral
● Supported by professional
staff with years of
experience

11. Eclipse IP Management
● The components that are identified as
needed are submitted for review.
● Each component is examined from the
standpoint of:
○ Provenance
○ License Suitability
○ Patent searches are not done
● We use tools to help us
● Our committers do much of the work

12. Eclipse & Standards

13. Working Groups
at Eclipse

14. Collaborative Working Groups
● Self-governing consortia and community
managed under the Eclipse umbrella
● IP Policy and Development Process apply
● Can have their own brand
● Can have their own forge
● Can have their own licensing
● Dues can be zero or more depending on
the needs of the group

15. PolarSys
● Focused on Open Source tools for the
development of Embedded Systems
○ Open Innovation to create better methods and tools
○ Computer Assistance and Automation
○ Certification to ease the tools qualification in complex
certification processes
○ Very Long Term Support – up to 10 and 75 years
●

17. Eclipse IoT

18. Eclipse IoT in numbers
2+ 24 150+ 100K
MLOC projects developers monthly
visitors

19. It is all about innovation

20. It is all about innovation
Open Source enables:
•Permissionless innovation
•Innovation through integration
•Far higher levels of experimentation

22. The Power of Developer Choice

23. What makes a standard
successful anyway?

25. SDOs

26. SDOs
Adopters

27. What is success from an SDO PoV?

28. ● You show progress with intermediate
releases
● You reach consensus (v1.0) ASAP, and
your standard doesn’t arrive too late
SDO
Deliver in a timely manner

29. ● Standard (including V1!) covers
use cases of the targeted
industry/domain at large, not only of
those companies involved in the
standardization process
SDO
Be relevant

30. ● You have a community of users
● You have a community of
developers/integrators
● You have a community of
solutions/services vendors
SDO
Community

31. What is success from an adopter PoV?

32. ● The IPR and licensing model can
(almost) be understood by mere mortals
● The standard allows open source
implementations
Adopter
Licensing

33. ● There are other users of the
standard
● You can recruit developers
knowledgeable about the standard
● The standard enables new business
models (integration/collaboration with
other vendors using the same standards,
etc.)
Adopter
Ecosystem

34. ● You can evaluate the standard
freely
● There is a large variety of existing
implementations of the standards
(giving you even more freedom)
Adopter
Low entry barrier

35. How can open source help?
Trends from the Eclipse and Eclipse IoT
community

36. Example #1
OMA Lightweight M2M
How going for an open approach can
accelerate standard adoption & time to release

37. Example: OMA Lightweight M2M
● OMA LWM2M is a REST API for device
management
● Based on CoAP and DTLS (IETF
standards)

38. Timeline
May 2013: first OSS implementation in C
March 2014: contributed as Eclipse Wakaama
Jul. 2014: first public sandbox
Sep. 2014: new Eclipse Leshan project (Java)
Jan. 2015: OMA starts using Github
May 2016: 67 “issues” addressed, 17 Eclipse
committers on LWM2M projects (from different
companies), commercial adoption

39. Looking back…

40. Looking back…
Eclipse Leshan sandbox is used by many
vendors for early prototyping,
integration tests, etc.

41. Looking back…

42. Looking back…
Public issue tracker for LWM2M specification
gets lots of community feedback

43. LWM2M takeaways
● Release often / have public drafts
● Support the community (e.g sandbox,
testbeds, …)
● Encourage diversity (e.g multiple
implementations)
● Listen to community input

44. Example #2
MQTT
From a de-facto standard to an OASIS and
ISO/IEC standard

45. MQTT?
● A Publish-Subscribe protocol for the
Internet of Things
○ Simple to implement
○ Quality of Service
○ Lightweight & Bandwidth Efficient
● Invented in 1999 by Andy Stanford-Clark
(IBM) and Arlen Nipper (Arcom)
● Version 3.1 released royalty free in 2010
● Open Sourced in 2011

46. “MQTT” on Google Trends
Can you guess what
happened then?

47. IPR / Licensing
● No essential claims behind the MQTT (OASIS)
standard (this is by design of the OASIS
Technical Committee)
● Eclipse Paho source code is dual licensed:
○ Eclipse Public License
○ Eclipse Distribution License (BSD-3)
⇒ redistributing the source code is not
mandatory (important for embedded)

48. What do Microsoft Azure IoT suite, AWS IoT, or
IBM Watson IoT platform have in common?

49. What do Microsoft Azure IoT suite, AWS IoT, or
IBM Watson IoT platform have in common?

50. Eclipse Incubators - Paho
“ A permanent incubator is a project that is
intended to perpetually remain in the incubation
phase. Permanent incubators are an excellent
place to innovate, test new ideas, grow
functionality that may one day be moved into
another project, and develop new committers.
⇒ Can be used to experiment with upcoming
standard features ahead of the release
⇒ May be used to feed the standard with new use
cases, requirement, etc.

51. MQTT takeaways
● Standard bodies complement the work of
open source communities
○ Writing code ≠ writing standards
● Open source can literally boost adoption of a
standard
● More developers on the market
● OSS projects can fuel your standardization
work with use cases, requirements, …

52. In a nutshell…

53. Key takeaways
● Growing an ecosystem is key, and OSS is
one lever
● Open Source foundations have decades
of experience in creating thriving
communities of contributors, users and
adopters
● Developers are the new kingmakers

54. SDOs Adopters
OSS
communities

55. Thank you! Questions?
benjamin@eclipse.org
@kartben
http://eclipse.org