As a non-profit company, the Eclipse Foundation is dedicated to encouraging and supporting open source projects and the related communities. Towards this end, each year the Foundation elects its Board of Directors, a representative committee, that significantly codetermines the Foundation’s strategic orientation. Matthias Zimmermann has been elected to the Strategy Board for the first time.
In recent years, Matthias Zimmermann has driven the open sourcing of BSI’s business application framework, Eclipse Scout, the development of commercial offerings and the fostering of its open source community. Now the open source expert and project manager at BSI is taking a further step: in the Foundation’s Board of Directors, Matthias Zimmermann aims to support to the Foundation's orientation towards long-term, successful open source projects. “I am looking forward to sharing our experience and values with the Eclipse foundation and to assuming this strategic role within the Foundation. My goal is to help the foundation in becoming a recognized home for many other successful open source projects, which cover a broad, heterogeneous spectrum,” stated Matthias Zimmermann.
In Switzerland, BSI is a pioneer in the open source field and since 2006 has produced dozens of future-proof business applications based on the Scout framework. “The development of commercial applications using open source technologies is no contradiction. Actually, quite the opposite is true: Many open source technologies contribute to speeding up software development and enhancing product quality. BSI’s Scout framework is a good example: It is easy to learn and boosts the productivity of Java developers. Our customers appreciate its production quality and flexibility that allows for simple integration into existing IT landscapes,” according to Matthias Zimmermann.
Promotion of the global community
For the open source expert it is now a matter of not only acting as a member of the Foundation, but to help the Board of Directors to foster awareness in the software world which Eclipse has opened in recent years for all open source projects. This means that a broad palette of open source projects can already be found under the Eclipse umbrella. This fact is frequently not yet anchored in the awareness of the IT industry, where Eclipse is predominantly known as a development environment.
“Every new open source project brings its own community along with it, thus helping to ensure the long-term future of Eclipse. To promote this heterogeneous array, to create convergence and to work constructively and proactively towards the development of these communities are among my goals as Member of the Board of the Eclipse Foundation,” stated Matthias Zimmermann.
The Eclipse project manager has already actively dedicated himself to the open source community with organizing Eclipse demo camps in both Zurich and Munich. “The open source philosophy matches our BSI values. We are open, honest and humble, and seek to become at least 100 years old. We do it; to speak in the conditional tense does not make us happy”. This consistency between open source and BSI’s values is now being honored at the foundation level. “We are pleased to be able to contribute to the successful positioning of the Eclipse foundation and being strategically involved in the expansion of the ecosystem and development of sustainable open source technologies,” enthused Matthias Zimmermann.
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