
The Eclipse Foundation Is Moving to Europe - tzmudzin
https://eclipse-foundation.blog/2020/05/12/moving-to-europe/
======
mtnygard
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.

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

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

~~~
jkaplowitz
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.

~~~
briandear
> /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.

~~~
jkaplowitz
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.

~~~
not2b
"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.

~~~
t0mas88
ICAO disagrees, a child born on an aircraft is subject to the laws of the
country the aircraft is registered in.

~~~
jkaplowitz
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birth_aboard_aircraft_and_ships)

~~~
t0mas88
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.

~~~
jkaplowitz
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.

------
ape4
Funny headline: "Total Eclipse to depart"
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/12/eclipse_moves_to_eu...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/12/eclipse_moves_to_europe/)

~~~
DonHopkins
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](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

~~~
KMag
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).

~~~
asveikau
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluggable_look_and_feel)

~~~
int_19h
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.

------
chrisseaton
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.

~~~
switch007
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...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/12/eclipse_moves_to_europe/)

------
cesarb
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](https://riscv.org/risc-v-history/#international)).

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

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

------
wolfgke
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".

~~~
gowld
Why Belgium? Why not a city in Belgium?

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

~~~
wolfgke
> 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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement&oldid=953332723)).
Keep in mind that the EU started withtrade agreements, too.

~~~
allendoerfer
> 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.

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

~~~
itronitron
I actually prefer Eclipse over IntelliJ for java development.

~~~
pirocks
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.

~~~
itronitron
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.

~~~
hrgiger
Generic completions!

------
greendave
> 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.

------
sam_lowry_
Welcome to Belgium ;-)

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
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.

------
raverbashing
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?

~~~
aarroyoc
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/](https://projects.eclipse.org/)

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

------
j-pb
I wish all things eclipse would stay where they are,

far far far away from me.

------
notadonut
Eclipse added Huawei as a strategic member last fall:

[https://blog.huawei.com/2019/10/22/huawei-becomes-a-
strategi...](https://blog.huawei.com/2019/10/22/huawei-becomes-a-strategic-
member-of-the-eclipse-foundation/)

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.

~~~
xenophonf
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.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
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.

~~~
jkaplowitz
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.

