Last year, I blogged about the Friends of Eclipse program expansion that the Eclipse Committer Representatives and I pushed through the board.
Well I’m happy to report that the program expansion finally launched (see the wiki for details). Funds can be used to support purchases and activities that benefit (directly or indirectly) the Eclipse community. To request usage of funds, you have to write a proposal and submit it via bugzilla (under Community->FoE Disbursements):
It’s important to note that any allocation is subject to any restrictions defined by the Eclipse Bylaws, and Board Directives. For example, According to the Bylaws (section 11.4), eclipse.org cannot fund member (includes committer member) work or travel expenses. However, it’s possible to fund student work along the lines of the Summer of Code initiative. Some potential funding examples can include:
- test infrastructure (hardware)
- cloud computing time
- software tools
- student-related activities or events
- Eclipse-related events (e.g. code camps, project summits)
- Eclipse-related meetings (e.g., conference room for an Eclipse-related get-together)
So as a concrete example, let’s pretend you were a student at university and wanted to host a Eclipse meetup… you could use the funds for food and frosty beverages. Another example would be if you were an eclipse.org committer lead on a project and you wanted to host a team meeting… a proposal could be written to request funds to help that meeting happen. In the end, use the guiding principle that as long as your proposal benefits the Eclipse community in some fashion and meets the rules, your proposal should be fine.
On the whole, I hope this program benefits the Eclipse community and also entices people to become Friends of Eclipse to support the community. The more friends we have, the more funds we will have for Eclipse community usage.