Today marks the launch of LocationTech, a community of open source projects and consortium of member companies.  LocationTech is designed to help broaden adoption of commercial location aware technologies.  It is vendor neutral, open to all, and operates transparently.  LocationTech is the Eclipse Foundation’s industry working group focusing
on location aware technologies. Members of LocationTech are also full
fledged members of the Eclipse Foundation.

LocationTech is hosted by the Eclipse Foundation.  Eclipse is a vendor neutral community for individuals and organizations who wish to collaborate on commercially-friendly open source software. The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit, member supported corporation that hosts technology projects and helps cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products and services.  Eclipse hosts over 270 active open source projects and is supported by over 185 members.

Commercially-friendly licensing

An important aspect of Eclipse is the focus on enabling the use of open source technology in commercial software products and services. Eclipse consciously promotes and encourages software vendors to use Eclipse technology for building their commercial software products and services. This is made possible because Eclipse projects are licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL), a commercial friendly OSI approved license.

LocationTech Governance

LocationTech is governed by bodies consisting of member representatives including a steering committee, architecture committee, and a marketing committee. These bodies make strategic, technology, and marketing decisions for LocationTech.  There are four levels of participation at LocationTech:

Guest Members

Guest Members are people or organizations of note that are invited to participate in the working group by LocationTech’s Steering Committee.

Committer Members

Committer members are nominated and elected by other committers to become a committer for a given open source project. Committers members contribute to open source projects hosted at LocationTech.

 Participating members

Participating members view location aware technologies as an important part of their business. They invest to support and participate in the ecosystem.

Strategic Members

Strategic members view location aware technologies as strategic to their business. They invest to further develop the technology and influence the direction of the industry.