Eclipse Membership 3.0

I imagine 1.0 would be the initial consortium board and 2.0 would have been when the foundation was launched as an independent foundation almost five years ago.

Today begins the next chapter in our Membership as the new Eclipse Foundation Bylaws and Membership Agreement have been overwhelmingly approved by the Membership at Large.

95.8% were in favor of the proposed changes (157 votes)
4.2% voted against the changes (7 votes).

Quorum (2/3rds of membership at large) was easily achived. Thanks to all of the members who took time to vote.

So what changes? There are three major changes to our membership structure (2 related to the vote, and 1 by board resolution last month):

1 - "Add-In Providers" are now known as "Solutions Members". A simple name change, but it more accurately reflects the kind of organization the membership represents. Our members have said that marketing they are "Add-In Providers" to IT consumers made no sense -- but marketing they are "Solutions Members" is much more intuitive. It also suits our growing training and services membership better.

2 - A new membership class "Enterprise Membership" is created. This gives us an opportunity to attract a broader membership base of organizaitons not traditionally associated with Software. We're working on some benefits and bundles to offer resources related to helping Enterprises with open source Intellectual Property, enganging with open source communities and support for launching their own forays into open source. We plan to formally launch this new membership class later in 2008 with a bit of a splash - but for now, we now finally have the structure to support it.

3 - By virtue of board resolution last month, any organization can now become an Associate Member - it's not just restricted to non-profits and public service organizations. This means small and mid-size organizations who don't have commercial offerings with Eclipse, but want to show support for the ecosystem, have an easy way to do so.

For full details on the changes, you can see the Vote 2008 page.

- Don