What is the Eclipse IDE Working Group?

The Eclipse IDE Working Group exists because the Eclipse ecosystem is too important to leave to chance.

It is a group of companies, some of the largest and most technically sophisticated organizations in the world, that have decided, collectively, that they cannot afford to let Eclipse stagnate. They fund it, they shape its direction, and they hold a shared stake in its future. This is not passive sponsorship. It is an active investment from organizations whose own software depends on the platform remaining viable, modern, and maintained.

What makes this group remarkable is how different its members are from one another. Automotive manufacturers sit alongside semiconductor companies. Healthcare platforms share the table with financial infrastructure providers. At first glance, there is no obvious thread connecting them; their industries are different, their products are different, their customers are different.

The thread is Eclipse.

Every company in the Working Group runs critical software built on Eclipse RCP, SWT, or related technologies. Some of these applications have been in production for decades. They are too large to rewrite, too embedded in operations to replace, and too valuable to abandon. The Eclipse ecosystem is not an implementation detail for these organizations. It is the foundation their business runs on.

That shared dependency is what the Working Group is really about. By investing in the platform together, its members are not just supporting their own applications; they are sustaining an enormous body of software that runs across industries worldwide. The scale of what Eclipse quietly powers is difficult to overstate, and the Working Group is what keeps that infrastructure moving forward.

A mission built around modernization

Since Equo was founded, one thing has never changed: we build for teams that need modern capabilities without sacrificing the applications they've spent years building.

Java powers some of the most critical software in the world, and a significant part of that software has been running for decades, refined, battle-tested, and deeply embedded in the operations of the organizations that depend on it. Our entire history as a company has been about giving those teams a path forward. Not a replacement. Not a rewrite.

Over the years, one ecosystem kept showing up at the center of that work: Eclipse. The companies running Eclipse RCP and SWT applications represent exactly the kind of investment we exist to protect. Years of Java code, thousands of plugins, and business logic that simply cannot be thrown away. The more we worked with these teams, the clearer it became that Eclipse modernization was not a niche problem. It was the problem for a very large part of the Java world.

That realization demanded a response. So we built one. SWT Evolve is the path we knew Eclipse teams needed, a way to modernize without rewriting, to move forward without leaving behind the code that took decades to build, and to give those applications what they were always missing: a modern interface, the ability to run in a browser, and a clear path to cloud delivery. One year of hard work, and we delivered it.

But this was never the finish line. Solving the problem for our clients was the foundation, not the ceiling. We knew from the start that getting there would only be the beginning. The next step was always waiting, and now we are ready to take it.

One step further.

The Eclipse IDE Working Group needs more than funding to keep the ecosystem alive. Funding maintains what exists, but what Eclipse needs is to evolve. To become something competent with today's standards, today's technologies, and today's expectations. Change is the key to prevalence, and innovation is the key to success.

That is the gap Equo is here to fill.

Our membership is unlike any other in the group. Every other company joins because they run software built on Eclipse and need the platform to keep supporting it. Equo does not. We are not here because we depend on Eclipse. We are here because we can change it. As an innovation leader that has spent years pushing Java and Eclipse applications toward modern standards, our place is inside the ecosystem, shaping where it goes next, alongside the contributors building it.

We are confident that Equo is the key to a significant change in Eclipse's history, and in the future of every company whose software runs on it. We have built the tool that makes that possible. SWT Evolve already offers every Eclipse and SWT team an instant path to modern UX, web delivery, and cross-platform parity, without changing a line of code.

That is what we are bringing into the Working Group. Not a use case. A direction. And a commitment to every team building on Eclipse that the future of this ecosystem is not something that will happen to them. It is something we will build together.

Learn more

Explore SWT Evolve and visit the Eclipse IDE Working Group to learn about the organizations shaping the future of the Eclipse ecosystem.