Originally developed by IBM starting in the late 1990s as a development tools platform in Java, it was released to open source licensing in 2001. An organization, the Eclipse Consortium, was created with support from IBM and eight other high tech companies.
In order to dispel the impression that some developers had that Eclipse was too much under IBM control, a totally independent not-for-profit organization, the Eclipse Foundation, with its own staff and budget, was created in 2004. A number of well known software organizations contribute money, developer time and direction to the foundation.
