The Eclipse Foundation Is Moving to Europe | Hacker News Reader

The Eclipse Foundation Is Moving to Europe

eclipse-foundation.blog

244 pointstzmudzin82 comments

From the FAQ linked in the post:

"This move will provide global stakeholders more choice for their strategic open source initiatives. We believe that more choice and greater diversity will be of benefit to both the global open source communities, and for the industries that rely upon and collaborate with them. The Eclipse Foundation aspires to be a truly global institution, now with a new European home."

What does this really mean? If the move creates more choice, then what is restricting the choice today? If it creates greater diversity, what is restricting it today?

This reads like there's something they're trying to say without saying, but I don't know what I should be reading between the lines.

People who can't/won't travel to the US. Is probably the main thing.

They’re moving from Canada, so assume people can’t/won’t travel to Canada.

Although their article clarifies that this isn't about changing anyone's physical location, as a general point about flying to/from Canada, many of the affordable itineraries involve connections through US airports and/or overfly US airspace (in a way that gives the US at least some authority over those flights).

This is not true for all flights to/from Canada, of course, but it does add complexity, expense, and often travel time for people who want to deal with Canada while avoiding US authority.

> /or overfly US airspace (in a way that gives the US at least some authority over those flights).

Overflight of US airspace doesn't give the US authority over the people inside the airplane. And flights to Canada from Europe or Asia don't overfly the US, except perhaps Alaska, but that's of zero consequence.

Overflight of US airspace does give the US authority to choose who is allowed on the plane, to require the airline to provide specified information to them through the passenger manifest, and to impose other conditions simply for being allowed to overfly. A person born in a plane overflying US airspace at the time of birth is a US citizen. An emergency landing of a flight overflying the US will often land in the US, and a plane ordered by US authorities to land while overflying has to comply. Lots of US influence in this area.

You're right that many direct flights between Canada and Europe or Asia don't overfly the US. Many of the affordable options are via US connections, however, and travelers from the rest of the world to Canada frequently overfly the US.

As for Alaska, it's very much a part of the US, to the level that everything I said above is true for flights which only overfly Alaska and none of the rest of the US.

"A person born in a plane overflying US airspace at the time of birth is a US citizen."

It's unclear (and doubtful) whether that is true:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

Courts could probably use the jurisdiction language to say "nope". No idea whether there have been any court cases over this though.

The Constitution sets the minimum bar, but the legislature can grant citizenship beyond that.

I'm not sure whether it's due to a specific law, or courts applying 14A, but there's broad agreement that babies born in US airspace are, indeed, US citizens.

The jurisdiction language basically excludes parents with diplomatic immunity, under current rules, not other people flying above the US regardless of the aircraft's country of registration or any other status attributes of the parents.

In practice, what I said above is well-settled legal and administrative practice in the US, whether or not the constitutional words could have been interpreted or differently by Congress and/or the courts.

US authorities receiving proof of birth above the US and lacking reason to suspect parental diplomatic immunity certainly will and actually do grant proof of US citizenship, no further argument needed once the location of birth is documented.

ICAO disagrees, a child born on an aircraft is subject to the laws of the country the aircraft is registered in.

Although the registration country's laws do indeed generally apply on aircraft, that is in addition to what I said, not instead of it. Nationality laws can grant or withhold citizenship worldwide regardless of location and regardless of whichever other laws apply for most purposes.

For example, as an American who lived in the US for more than my first 30 years of life, any (biological) kid I have anywhere in the world will be a US citizen by birth, regardless of location, based solely on US law, even though outside the US I'm generally subject to the host country's laws and not to US laws. (Nationality laws are not the only US laws to have extraterritorial application, but the default rule is for US laws to apply domestically only.)

As an inverse example, the denial of US citizenship by birth to people born in the US to two diplomatically immune parents is solely due to US law, not due to any international agreement, even though the diplomatic parents are mostly immune to US law and subject to at least a large fraction of their home country's law.

Here's a general Wikipedia summary of how birth aboard aircraft and ships works for purposes of nationality, including specific comments on Canada and the US, as well as addressing the two international conventions that people often think are relevant to this question but aren't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_aboard_aircraft_and_ship...

Very true, countries can deviate from this in the positive direction. So the US is free to grant citizenship to a lot more than these (e.g. anyone born with at least one US parent, that's also what my country does), but it's not required by ICAO, it's a decision the US can make unilaterally.

Right. But it's more than that: there's no default from which to deviate in any direction. Every country can freely choose who it considers as its citizens under all circumstances regardless of which law usually applies where, and I don't think any treaties cover that (with some narrow and not-worldwide exceptions around people who would otherwise be stateless) including the ICAO ones. ICAO's rule for the "Lex loci" of airplanes is irrelevant to the nationality question except when a nation's domestic law of nationality makes it relevant for granting (or withholding) that nation's nationality.

The US nationality rule for birth outside of the US is narrower than "anyone with one US parent", by the way. It wouldn't apply to cases like mine if my time spent living in the US had been below a certain threshold. By contrast, even children born in the US to those whose presence in the US is unlawful or otherwise irregular are citizens by birth.

Citizenship is defined by the country that grants it.

>a flight overflying the US will often land in the US, and a plane ordered by US authorities to land while overflying has to comply. Lots of US influence in this area.

Is it possible that some people are afraid of being charged with "Conspiracy against the United States" [1] and that they have to wait a long time in the USA until a jury decides that they are innocent?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_against_the_United_...

It's possible, sure. That's never been high on the list of criminal charges I've ever heard people worry about, but I'm sure it's relevant to some people.

US handles overflights and transfers differently from practically every other country out there. For overflight, TSA gets lists of passengers in advance, and runs them against the no-fly list - if you're on that list, you won't be allowed to board, even if your plane never even lands in US.

Wouldn’t the main reason be that they are seeing most growth in Europe?

If the majority of your developers are in Europe it would be cheaper to focus your efforts there.

Further, it’s also closer to folks in Asia and probably easier and cheaper for them to travel.

Traveling for what?

Newspeak is always used with the intent to be opaque. To not drop hints or offer clues at a hidden message. Instead, the goal is to be impenetrable.

Instead, the action itself must be interpreted, and not the words the actors couch their deeds in.

The lines have nothing between them. The real information (juicy gossip, inside dirt) is wholly elsewhere. This is merely a "change of address" sign posted on the front door, with some decorative Art Nouveau clip art decorating the notice.

For better or worse, the balance of global commerce is rapidly moving to Asia. The US is no longer the only country capable of advanced software development, nor necessarily the most qualified (particularly in the embedded space).

I think the Eclipse Foundation sees more of their growth happening in Asia, and that's a lot easier to do from the EU as their working hours overlap with both the US and Asia. Working hours in Asia don't overlap very well with American hours; their most productive hours happen in the middle of the night for us.

I'm sure there are other reasons too, but these seem like some of the most practical.

Reads like the pro-European-HQ camp just rah rah chest beating about how great Europe is, without saying anything concrete there might be controversial.

Maybe hinting about other comparable open source foundations (FSF? Apache? Debian?) not being in Europe? Is that true?

What about taxes and the EU grants? The latter tend to be significant.

Nonprofits in the US don't pay taxes.

Funny headline: "Total Eclipse to depart" https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/12/eclipse_moves_to_eu...

IBM strategically named Eclipse to piss off Sun (and it worked: Sun couldn't come to grips with the total eclipse).

It's ironic now that you can have a total Eclipse without the Sun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmLk2vSXXtk

    Total Eclipse: Klaus Nomi (from "Urgh! A Music War")

    Big shots
    Argue about what they've got
    Making the planet so hot
    Hot as a holocaust

    Blow up
    Everything's gonna go up
    Even if you don't show up
    In your Chemise Lacoste

    Total eclipse
    It's a total eclipse
    It's a total eclipse of the sun
    Can't come to grips with the total eclipse
    Just a slip of the lips and you're done

    Fall out
    Nobody left to crawl out
    If someone calls
    We're all out
    Turning in to French fries

    Last dance
    Let the entire cast dance
    Do the dismembered blast dance
    As we get atomized!

    Total eclipse
    It's a total eclipse
    It's a total eclipse of the sun
    Can't come to grips with the total eclipse
    Just a slip of the lips and you're done

Jikes, JikesRVM (formerly Jalepeno JVM), and SWT were all solid Java projects from IBM. I'm really sad that Sun didn't sell off Java to IBM before selling the rest of itself to Oracle ("the lawnmower", according to Bryan Cantrill).

I understand that a big part of Sun's value was in Java, but the many-core high-I/O-bandwidth server business was still valuable to Oracle and synergized pretty well with Oracle's business (outside of the legal department). The value to the world as a whole was much higher with IBM (or, at a second choice, Google) owning Java and Oracle (or some other high-I/O bandwidth enterprise product vendor) owning the Sun hardware business.

The Jikes compiler's startup time was so much faster than Sun's javac, and Java compilers perform very few optimizations when compiling source to bytecode. (My understanding is that the spec restricts which optimizations are allowed.)

JikesRVM (a JVM written in Java) had surprisingly good performance for a small research project. It's bootstrap process involved AoT-compiling itself, so it would have been not too big a leap to have a general non-GCJ AoT for Java years earlier, and (because it uses its normal second-tier JIT for AoT compilation) presumably not too difficult to get the hot paths all re-inlined and re-optimized even through the AoT-compiled code.

I think a very small minority of developers or users preferred the look of Swing (or worse, AWT) widgets to SWT. Sure, SWT widgets looked different across platforms, but the alien look of Swing/AWT widgets was very off-putting to users (and to a lesser extent, I tihnk, developers).

SWT was extremely nice.

I disagree. Did you write code for it? It was terrible as a Java library. Very low level, forcing you to manually manage resources like it was C.

The API design was also terrible, seemingly designed by someone who had never seen Java before.

AWT used native widgets. It looked less alien than Swing.

Swing also had a theme engine (PLAF I believe it was called) that wasn't terrible. It could look like Motif or Windows or Apple had one that looked like Aqua, set as their default back when they bundled JVM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluggable_look_and_feel

Originally, that platform L&F was pretty bad - for example, fonts were rendered using some bundled engine (FreeType?), instead of the OS text APIs. On Windows, at least, this meant no ClearType, which made all Java apps on XP+ with default settings stick out like a sore thumb.

Bongo was by far the most advanced user interface toolkit and editor for Java of its time. It had a HyperCard-like GUI editor AND an interactive script editor that let you build and edit applications and user interfaces while they were running, just like HyperCard, instead of recompiling and restarting every time you made a change.

https://people.apache.org/~jim/NewArchitect/webtech/1997/10/...

>Feel the Beat with Marimba's Bongo

>By Chris Baron

>In 1996, four programmers from the original Java-development team left Sun to form Marimba and produce industrial-strength Java-development tools for user interface and application administration. Bongo, one of Marimba's two shipping products, allows developers to create either a Java-application interface or a standalone Java-based application called a "presentation." A Bongo presentation resembles a HyperCard stack -- it allows developers to quickly create an application with a sophisticated user interface, but without the tedious programming of directly coding in Java or C/C++. Bongo's nonprogramming, visual approach makes it ideal for producing simple applications that don't involve a lot of processing, such as product demonstrations, user-interface prototypes, and training applications. Bongo is fully integrated with Castanet, Marimba's other product, a technology for remotely installing and updating Java applications.

https://www.amazon.com/Official-Marimba-Guide-Bongo-Goodman/...

>Official Marimba Guide to Bongo, by Danny Goodman

Another fun one.. Selenium was given its name because that element is used to treat mercury poisoning. (Mercury was a testing tool of that time).

Parts of OpenStack were named after the biggest logging company in the Amazon, which seems... less amusing.

I think the headline writer should be rightly proud of that one. Made me smile, anyway :D

Some context not in here is that I think they're moving from Ottawa. I think a lot of people think they're quitting the US, and drawing lots of conclusions from that, but it's actually Canada.

According to The Register, people aren't moving from Ottawa, and the legal entity is moving from the US to EU:

> Executive director Mike Milinkovich told The Register: "This is about re-domiciling the legal entity that controls The Eclipse Foundation from the US to Europe."

> Today's move is a little more major (although won't involve moving bottoms from Ottawa seats to something a bit more Belgian just yet).

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/12/eclipse_moves_to_eu...

Aren’t they moving the parent US organisation registration to Europe? The Canadian operations seem to be staying untouched:

>The Eclipse Foundation, while currently a USA incorporated not-for-profit organization, already manages its operations split between Canada and Europe, so there will be minimal to no impact to the Foundation’s operations.

In the statement they said they were a "USA incorporated not-for-profit organization" which already manages operations between Canada (like you said) and the US.

It also mentioned that the names, brand, trademark, intellectual property and anti-trust will be managed by the new belgian entity.

There's nothing wrong with that. It sounds like the move is partially motivated by legal reasons. As an amateur who likes to know the details of laws, I'm interested what the differences are between their current legal entity and the new belgian one.

This reminds me of the RISC-V Foundation, which also moved to Europe a couple of months ago (https://riscv.org/risc-v-history/#international).

That move is china ...is this move as well

Clearly they enjoyed FOSDEM so much, they decided to stay!

Why the headline "The Eclipse Foundation Is Moving to Europe"?

This is like writing "ACME Is Moving to the American doublecontinent".

Europe is very diverse in sense of languages, countries etc.

So, they should better have written "The Eclipse Foundation Is Moving to Belgium".

Why Belgium? Why not a city in Belgium?

Europe is gelling into a political unit, with the EU and all.

> Europe is gelling into a political unit, with the EU and all.

Similarly, North and Middle America with the NAFTA (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=North_American_Fr...). Keep in mind that the EU started withtrade agreements, too.

> Similarly North and Middle America with the NAFTA

But they did not destroy each other completely two times during the last century, so they might be less convinced than Europe, that this is necessary.

Sure but the crucial thing might be Europe. For instance, I might tell a partner I'm going to the supermarket - not that I'm going to the Safeway Aisles 3/7/8 in the Safeway at the top of Diamond Heights in San Francisco. That's the magic of communication, knowing when to use the specific and when the general. I think they did well here.

>Europe is very diverse in sense of languages, countries etc.

But not in its sense of handling legal entities. IP law and anything relevant to the operation of a foundation like this is mostly determined by EU law.

Serious question, how many people are still using Eclipse for day-to-day development?

The ones chained to their desks in a basement.

A shocking amount of very sad enterprise developers I'm afraid. I interviewed a SWE candidate recently who told me they learned java and used eclipse in college. I suggested he ask for a refund of his tuition as a joke.

Eclipse IDE about 20% it seems: https://snyk.io/wp-content/uploads/25a.png

But the Eclipse foundation has many projects that are not realted to the IDE: https://projects.eclipse.org/

I didn't even know there was an Eclipse Foundation either. I thought they were an Apache Foundation project.

The eclipse foundation is to eclipse what the Apache Software Foundation is to Apache httpd.

Everyone at my office ecxept me uses eclipse. 22 eclipses and 1 intellij

Eclipse Foundation is a lot more than just Eclipse the IDE.

For example, both Chromium and AOSP use Gerrit for code review, and JGit, an Eclipse project, is a key dependency of Gerrit. So everyone working with AOSP and Chromium day-to-day have to (indirectly) work with Eclipse Foundation projects.

Serious answer: people who are still using Eclipse won't answer here because it is not popular to use Eclipse here on HN.

The VS Code Java plugin's use the Eclipse Lanaguage Server under the covers, so probably more than people think.

Full disclosure, I work for the Eclipse Foundation. Assuming you are referring to the Eclipse Java IDE, the installed base of active users is in the millions.

I actually prefer Eclipse over IntelliJ for java development.

Not try to start a war.

I really don't understand how anyone can use eclipse. When I've used it, it feels incredibly clunky compared to intellij, stuff isn't discoverable, code completion is worse, quickfixes are harder to use etc.

They are very comparable products, but it's mostly a matter of what I am used to.

After using Eclipse for ten years I feel like IntelliJ makes some actions difficult to get to, either through weird key bindings or not providing them at all. I also prefer Eclipse's code completion as it feels like IntelliJ's gets in the way at times.

Generic completions!

I don't write Java all that much anymore, but I used to use it and still have it installed so I can fire it up from time to time. I much prefer to IntelliJ.

> The reason is straightforward – while we support a diverse, international ecosystem, most of our growth has already been happening in Europe.

Makes sense to be where your developers/members are.

Welcome to Belgium ;-)

It seems Eclipse has been losing market share to VS Code. Maybe this is a ploy to get the European regulators to fine Microsoft for anti-competitive behavior with regards to VS Code.

So, is it the Eclipse foundation "all about Eclipse" now (ok I know that Eclipse is a big project) or there are other big projects under its umbrella?

There are other projects, nowadays it's more like the Apache Foundation. Some other big projects are Jakarta EE, Jetty, and Golo.

List here: https://projects.eclipse.org/

Wasn't there an Eclipse-derived IDE already based in Belgium? Something springsource related perhaps? Sadly I can't find it anymore.

I wish all things eclipse would stay where they are,

far far far away from me.

Eclipse added Huawei as a strategic member last fall:

https://blog.huawei.com/2019/10/22/huawei-becomes-a-strategi...

As well as another company that partners with a Chinese government lab.

I have to wonder whether this was about technology transfer and geopolitics as it becomes more difficult to work with both China and the US.

Eclipse is an open source project. There's no technology to transfer because it's already accessible to everyone. This move is about improving the foundation's governance, and the EU has several advantages over the United States in this regard.

Genuinely curious. What are these? I was hoping to find these in the article. The article talks about growing in Europe (which seems like it should be possible if the "base" is in North America but with a large EU presence) and working on "innovative new open source projects" which should be doable from anywhere.

>"innovative new open source projects" which should be doable from anywhere

not if you're an Iranian developer and shut out due to US sanctions, which someone like the Eclipse foundation would have to comply with if they were still located in the US.

A year or so ago Github had to shut out Iranian, Syrian and Crimean developers for example.

Interesting, I hadn't thought about that.

My (limited) understanding is that US regulations are that firms that aid the government of Iran also are subject to sanction. If the move to Europe was primarily about allowing developers in Iran, Syria and Crimea to contribute, is there any threat to Eclipse's relationship with US developers?

The US doesn't give open source a pass on sanction enforcement. Witness the heavy-handedness of Github post acquisition. Maintaining US operations for a global team can create issues as the political winds shift.

Quite a lot of activity on GitHub isn't open source, especially not where they get their revenue from. But you're right that US authority can have severe impacts.

There should be more ethical considerations before adding such companies as "strategic members". They really shouldn't have.

I'm guessing it's about avoiding US authority for at least some current or future projects under the aegis of the foundation, or allowing some members like Huawei to participate more fully.

Even if technology transfer doesn't get away from US export rules for existing US-based projects, the switch might be relevant for future donations from Huawei to Eclipse.

Full disclosure - I work for the Eclipse Foundation. We are a vendor-neutral, membership-led organization with global reach. The primary motivations for this move were that ⅔’s of our members and ⅔’s of our committers were based in Europe, and we saw an opportunity to become even more relevant to our stakeholders. We think that being based in Europe will be an interesting differentiator, but we are in this to help foster worldwide collaboration, not get bogged down in politics.

> we are in this to help foster worldwide collaboration, not get bogged down in politics.

That was my point. Belgium, a famously neutral country, allows you to do that.

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