"The Eclipse community has really come into its own in recent times," the Eclipse Foundation says. " We are growing with leaps and bounds, not only in terms of the code that we ship but also our membership, be it companies or individual contributors."

The Ottawa-based Foundation has now issued what it calls a "Million Download Challenge" as a way to speed the downloads of its new version 3.1




"It took roughly 60 days for us to ship 1 million copies of 3.0.2. We feel we can do better than this for 3.1. For every day less than 60 that it takes for us to reach our 1 millionth download, willing members of the Eclipse community will donate either time or money (as appropriate) to a charity of their choosing. For instance, if it takes us 20 days to reach 1 million then those pledging will donate 40 times (60 days less 20) whatever they've pledged," according to the Foundation's website.

The Eclipse Foundation has also released an early list of people and companies who have agreed to participate in the challenge. The list includes:

• Kim Horne (Platform committer) - 1 hour/day to an undecided charity (likely involving little furry things) plus $5/day to Friends of Abandoned Pets.
• Ian Skerrett (Eclipse Foundation) - $20/day to the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario
• Kim Moir (Platform committer) - 1 hour/day to Ottawa Reads program plus $5/day to Ottawa Humane Society
  
• Bjorn Freeman-Benson - 1 hour/day to Friends of Trees
• Paul Webster (Platform helper :-) - $10/day to the Ottawa Food Bank
• Marko Schulz (happy user) - 10 €/day to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders)
• Denis Roy (Eclipse Foundation) - $10 CAD/day to Society for the Prevention
  of Cruelty to Animals
• Mike Milinkovich (Eclipse Foundation) - $20/day to the Canadian Cancer Society
• Mark Johnson - $5/day to Mercy Corps (Darfur humanitarian assistance)
• Karl Dinwiddie - $5/day to HetchHetchy.org (Restore Yosemite's Buried Treasure)
• Chris Aniszczyk (IBM / Gentoo) - $5/day to American Cancer Society
• Michael Van Meekeren (Platform UI lead) - 1 hour/day to Ottawa Inner City Ministries
• Jack Frosch (President, Gateway JUG) - $10/day to St. Louis Crisis Nursery
• Michael Valenta (Platform committer) - $10/day to Kanata Food Cupboard
• Richard Rodseth (rrodseth@mac.com) - $5/day to Mercy Corps
• Joel Miller (happy user) - $2/day to Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Douglas Pollock (Platform committer) - $20/day to Pink Triangle Services
• Ed Burnette (SAS) - $5/day to Raleigh Rescue Mission
• Darin Swanson (Ant lead, Debug and JDT debug committer) - $10/day to Portland Rescue Mission
• Patrick Mueller (IBM / happy user) - $2/day to Heifer International
• Jeff Brown (Principal Software Engineer / Object Computing Inc.) - $5/day to National Alliance For Autism Research
• Frank Sauer (IBM / Voicetools Project / Metrics Plug-in) - $20/day to the Big Cat Rescue in Tampa, FL
• Walter Harley (BEA Systems / APT committer) - $5/day to American Friends Service Committee

Eclipse delivers an open platform for tool integration. It offers a common public license that provides royalty free source code and world wide redistribution rights. The Eclipse Platform is written in the Java language and comes with extensive plug-in construction toolkits and examples. It has already been deployed on a range of development workstations including Linux, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, QNX, Mac OS X and Windows-based systems, the Foundation reports.