The Eclipse Foundation has launched Eclipse Labs, a portal hosted by Google that will feature open source projects that need exposure without going through the laborious processes of becoming an official Eclipse project.
Eclipse Labs will serve as a middle ground between starting a project on a forge, which can make it tough to get visibility in the Eclipse community, or going through the Eclipse project process, according to Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse executive director, in a blog post on Thursday. Some projects do not warrant the intellectual property due diligence and development processes expected of Eclipse projects, Milinkovich said.
“Last year, we started a discussion with the people running the project-hosting on [the] Google Code service to see if they would be interested in creating an Eclipse area on Google Code. They had already been thinking along the same lines and were very receptive to the idea. Therefore, I am excited to announce the availability of Eclipse Labs, a third option for Eclipse-oriented open source projects,” Milinkovich said. Eclipse Labs still is in a beta form.
Eclipse Labs, he said, allows developers to build a project with access to an issue-tracking system; source code repository, including Subversion or Mercurial; and a project Web site. The default license is Eclipse Public License, and projects on Eclipse Labs are not official Eclipse projects.
Project owners on Eclipse Labs will be encouraged to create tags or labels to describe a project.
“We have pre-populated a set of Eclipse-specific labels that will be displayed on the Eclipse Labs search page,” Milinkovich said. “Eclipse Labs will also have an API that allows people to search on these labels. My hope is that Eclipse projects will begin to highlight on their own Web site Eclipse Labs projects that are relevant to their own project.”
The API should be available in the next couple of weeks, he said.