MicroProfile, the community initiative to provide a microservices standard platform for enterprise Java, has joined the Eclipse Foundation to become an Eclipse project. The move is aimed at ensuring that MicroProfile remains a vendor-neutral project, and hopes to leverage the resources and momentum of the Eclipse Foundation. The decision hasn’t come without drawbacks though, causing some arguments and temporarily diverting efforts from other objectives.
Despite being born out of the collaboration of several Java EE vendors , MicroProfile champions always wanted to keep it separate from the vendors themselves; MicroProfile was to be a reference platform, with the different vendors providing their own implementations for it. For this reason, the transfer to the Eclipse Foundation has required that the MicroProfile project break some ties with the vendors that helped to create it, with intellectual property being transferred from the vendors to the Foundation.
