New board members light up Eclipse

By Martin LaMonica
Posted on ZDNet News: Mar 3, 2004 11:14:00 PM

The Eclipse open-source foundation on Wednesday announced four additional members to its newly formed board of directors.

Representatives of Genuitec, SAS Institute, the University of Washington and IBM were elected to the board on Tuesday. The four join software executives from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Ericsson, MontaVista Software, QNX Software Systems, SAP and Serena Software, who are current board members. A new executive director of Eclipse has not yet been chosen, according to the foundation.

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IBM founded Eclipse in late 2001 as an open-source consortium and last month changed the bylaws of the group to make it a not-for-profit open-source foundation. The Eclipse software is a platform for combining multiple development tools, such as source code management and application modeling, within a single programming application. The software can work with different programming languages but has become popular for use with Java.

The composition of Eclipse's governing board is closely watched, because the organization is in the process of breaking off from IBM and ceding control of Eclipse software's technical direction. In January, Sun Microsystems sent an open letter to Eclipse, expressing concern over the influence IBM employees will have, even within the newly formed independent organization.

Eclipse plans to choose a new executive director who will take over the duties of Skip McGaughey, an IBM executive who was on loan to Eclipse.

Another important matter for the board to consider is potential collaboration with other Java development tools organizations, notably the Java Tools Community and NetBeans, Sun's own open-source Java tools project.