Analysis of the software development process of inspectIT and changes required for joining the Eclipse Foundation

Abstract

In todays world there are many arguments for companies to use open source software. On the one hand they profit in terms of guaranteed future from the possibility that the software is supported by the open source community after the developing company decides to stop the support for its product. On the other hand companies can economically profit from the fact that they do not have to pay for using the software. A good practice to get in touch with these customers that use or plan to use open source software could be developing open source software oneself and publishing these software under a well-known open source license. One leading player in open source is the Eclipse Foundation. Since their establishment in 2004, more and more software products join the Eclipse Foundation , often using its open source license Eclipse Public License (EPL). A product that could benefit from becoming an Eclipse project is NovaTec’s Application Performance Management (APM) tool inspectIT. In this process analysis, we give a summary about the steps a project team needs to make to join the Eclipse Foundation and publish software under the EPL .