Maybe whenever there are a dozen or so companies trying to create a business model so they don't fight each other too much? Has that ever worked with the high profile Apache projects that people remember here (OpenOffice, CouchDB, etC)?
The biggest distinction is that Eclipse has an IP Policy where all of the code and assets has to have provenance of the code - either code submitted under a CLA, but if there are links to third party libraries, they are each independently reviewed by an on staff legal team. There are more details beyond this, but that level of human provenance review for every Eclipse project for it to be released, enables certain companies to more readily and easily adopt projects with not only an EPL license, but released as an Eclipse project with signed binaries on their hosted servers.
There are differences around mentoring, release process, hosting rules, infrastructure. But at the end of the day, it's about structure, rigorous rules, mentorship, and community.