itemis GmbH & Co. KG, an independent IT consultancy company has joined the Eclipse foundation in a bid to further its move towards open source. itemis already provides support for the Eclipse GMF project openArchitectureWare, a suite of tools and components assisting with model driven software development built upon a modular MDA/MDD generator framework implemented in Java supporting arbitrary import (design) formats, meta models, and output (code) formats. In addition, itemis is cooperating with the Department of Information Technology at the University of Applied Sciences in Dortmund, Germany to develop a unified, Eclipse-based platform for the model-driven development of embedded systems.
"We are very happy about our acceptance into the Eclipse community and will soon be offering an extensive range of training packages and services for Eclipse," comments Wolfgang Neuhaus, CEO of itemis, on this step. "Furthermore, we plan on integrating some of our own products into Eclipse under the open source license. For instance, CM3, an extension for UML tools, which facilitates modeling," says Neuhaus.
itemis has been taking advantage of the Eclipse platform and other open source tools in its consultancy projects for quite a while. "With itemis, we have gained another important partner, who has totally dedicated itself to the open source cause," says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. "The support of Eclipse provided by German companies such as itemis underscores the growing importance of open source in this market," Milinkovich added.