At least for the Eclipse Foundation they are. On June 30, the Eclipse Foundation will release "Callisto," the simultaneous release of 10 top Eclipse open-source projects. Next June the foundation will repeat the process, releasing upgrades to even more projects in an effort tentatively named "Europa," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. Both Callisto and Europa are names of moons of Jupiter.

"We expect to do this once a year; we're setting up a release train for 2007 under the proposed name Europa," Milinkovich said.

Bjorn Freeman-Benson, technical director of open-source process and infrastructure at the Eclipse Foundation, proposed the name. Freeman-Benson also proposed Callisto as the name for this year's inaugural simultaneous release.

"Callisto is an event, not a package," Milinkovich said.

Although Callisto is focused primarily on getting the projects to coordinate on a simultaneous release, Europa will likely have more involved.

Click here to read more about the 10 open-source projects being updated in Callisto.

"I expect there will be additional requirements placed on the project next year," Milinkovich said. "There will be more requirements, particularly focusing on integration between the projects."

Richard Gronbeck, project lead for the Eclipse Graphical Modeling Framework project and an engineer at Borland Software, said the goals for the move to Callisto and beyond are to "first align the dates [of releases], second to improve interoperability and third to get tighter integration" among the projects.

Milinkovich said he expects there to be more than 10 projects in the Europa release of Eclipse, but because participation is voluntary he will not know how many or which projects will be involved until the foundation asks for participants this fall.

However, work on the 2007 releases of some of the individual projects has begun, Milinkovich said.

The Eclipse Planning Council and the Eclipse Requirements Council will meet in Chicago this week to discuss what next year's simultaneous release will look like, including what the requirements for participation will be, Milinkovich said.

"The original idea for Callisto came up at the Requirements Council and Planning Council meeting last June," he said.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.