We're very excited to finally announce that Ceylon is moving to the Eclipse Foundation.

As you surely know, Red Hat has been the main sponsor of Ceylon over the years, and we're all eternally grateful for this support. It would have been simply impossible to kick-start a project of this scope without the backing of Red Hat. (Full disclosure: we ourselves are employed by Red Hat.)

The Red Hat brand is a synonym for open-source, quality, and community trust. But we've also had a growing fear that the strong association with just one company may have been holding back our community. We've always seen this project as "neutral ground", not as a vehicle for the business goals of one company, but we're not sure if the project is perceived that way from outside.

Joining an open source foundation allows us to dispel these doubts, allowing users and contributors to see Ceylon as a community project in which they can participate as equals and leave their mark.

Red Hat has had a very positive experience with the Eclipse Foundation, and we feel that Eclipse is the best place for Ceylon. We've already seen how membership of the Eclipse foundation has helped other projects which have recently joined. Naturally, Red Hat will continue to participate in Ceylon and help it to continue at the forefront of programming language innovation.

This move has now been in the works for several months, since it took time to get all the necessary legal approvals, and then the final approval from the Eclipse Foundation board. But at last we're ready to make the initial code contribution.

Head over to the Eclipse Ceylon project page and read more about Ceylon at Eclipse.

Note that we've decided to push out one last binary-compatible release of Ceylon 1.3 before moving everything over to Eclipse. Due to the rules of the Eclipse Foundation, the first release of Eclipse Ceylon won't be binary compatible with Ceylon 1.3, and will take some time to prepare.

Eclipse Ceylon has a great future at the Eclipse Foundation!