About the LTS Working Group

The LTS working group, hosted by the Eclipse Foundation, is focusing on enabling long term support for open source technologies. LTS membership is open to all members of the Eclipse foundation (with at least the solution member level).

For companies who committed themselves to maintain their software for several decades, the community support in general will not suffice.

The LTS working group was founded to assist these companies as well as those making a business out of providing maintenance and support for open source software.

While the Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation (and works on cost recovery basis) the LTS working group is meant to provide business opportunities to its member companies. At the same time, it operates completely within the open source principles that govern the Eclipse foundation. E.g. the source code will always be available under the open source license of the original project. That makes sure that consumer of support services provided via LTS do not risk any vendor lock-in.

The LTS working group is governed by bodies consisting of member representatives including a steering committee, change control committee, and general assembly. These bodies make strategic, technology, and marketing decisions.

Participation

There are four levels of participation:

1. Guest Members

   Guest Members are organizations who have been invited by the Steering Committee of LTS WG for a 6 month Guest Membership. They do not have voting rights in LTS WG meetings but will have the same access rights as Premium members for the duration of their membership. At the end of the 6 month trial period their access rights will be terminated.

2. Participating Members

   Participating members invest to support the ecosystem and receive access to binaries produced and tested by other members. Participating members pay annual dues to support the working group.

3. Premium Members

   Premium members receive all the rights of participating members and in addition, get access to a professionally supported forge they can use to modify, build, and test their modifications/fixes. As a result of these increased possibilities, premium members pay higher annual dues.

4. Steering Committee Members

   Steering committee members view this working group as strategic to their business. They receive all the rights of premium members, and in addition hold considerable influence over budget and the strategic direction of the working group. Steering committee members pay the highest annual dues .

   As a company in need for LongTerm Support of open source components you may want to join LTS in the role of a selfService maintenance provider. If you are a company offering support for open source components your role will be that of a maintenance or project service provider .

Value Proposition to Members

Stop fixing everything yourself

• Share fix binaries built by others
• Share code with the latest &greatest fixes integrated

Stop maintaining your own server farms

• Use our code repository, bug tracker, continuous integration server, build farm
• Save on cooling, real estate, power, system administration

Influence who is doing the changes

• Nominate one of your companies’ experts as self service maintenance committer. His/her role is tied to his/her employment with you
• Authorize a maintenance provider to do the fix for you and be sure to have access to the fixes at any time

Update your Eclipse OS projects regularly with bug fixes

• Use a LTS service release
• Download the binaries

On-demand responsiveness

• Use your company specific branch and the common build infrastructure to create hot fixes or security patches
• 7x24 Builds on demand

Get a good deal

• Our program shares the infrastruture costs across a wide ecosystem
• We are not-for-profit and operateon a cost-recovery basis

If you have any questions not answered here please see our FAQ.