Eclipse and Java: An Open Source Trend Analysis

2011 was a banner year for the open source community, especially for the Eclipse Foundation, which celebrated its 10th anniversary. In that vein, I decided to look at 2011 open source project trends and compare them to popular Eclipse projects. Using Ohloh.net, the free social directory of open source projects and developer resources (N.B.: Black Duck acquired Ohloh last year), I did a deep dive on a few key attributes of popular Eclipse projects in the context of the typical “flow” of an open source project.

My team and I compared the top 20 Eclipse projects to the top 100 Java projects. What stood out right away was the number and diversity of committers to both Eclipse and Java projects. The top projects in both categories have committers from a broad number of organizations – they’re not dominated by one vendor...