Following the announcement that Oracle was seeking to move Java EE technologies to an open-source foundation, the company has now said that they have chosen the Eclipse Foundation as the new custodians of the platform.
Oracle cites Eclipse’s ‘strong experience and involvement with Java EE and related technologies’ as a contributing factor to the choice.
The announcement came within weeks of the original announcement that Java EE was to be open sourced, as reported on InfoQ. The speed of the move has been welcomed by many, particularly given that lack of agility and release pace in the development of Java EE was one of the criticisms that led Oracle to make this move. Oracle admitted to this criticism in their original announcement, stating that the development process of Java EE ‘is not seen as being agile, flexible or open enough.’ Red Hat also welcomed the move, saying that it was ‘encouraging to see Oracle moving ahead at a rapid pace,’ and adding that it fully supports the decision to choose the Eclipse Foundation. IBM Distinguished Engineer Ian Robinson also applauded the announcement, stating that the IBM team was looking forward to participating in the new project at Eclipse.
One factor in choosing Eclipse was that it is already the home of MicroProfile, a project aimed at optimizing enterprise Java for microservices and cloud-based architectures. In the blog post announcing the choice of Eclipse, Oracle mentions their desire to ‘leverage complementary projects such as MicroProfile’. Red Hat, one of the original collaborators of MicroProfile, said that they hoped moving Java EE to Eclipse would ‘make it easier to align Java EE and MicroProfile’, a sentiment echoed by IBM.
Ondro Mihályi who is both a contributor to MicroProfile and a member of the Java EE Guardians group, said that Eclipse would be seen as a ‘very natural choice for Java EE and is very welcome by the Java EE and MicroProfile communities’.
Oracle states that it turned first to Red Hat and IBM to ask for help and support in the move, as between them the three organizations represent the largest contributors to Java EE. Achieving this, they next worked on refining just what moving Java EE to an open source foundation would actually mean. This resulted in a comprehensive strategy covering technical details, licensing, branding and definition of the process by which the platform can evolve in the future. Details can be found on the blog post. Finally Oracle carried out discussions with several open-source foundations to discuss the proposal. The outcome of these talks is the announcement that Oracle have chosen the Eclipse Foundation as the new custodians of the Java EE platform.