Frequently asked questions

Eclipse Tractus-X™ is an open-source project of the Eclipse Foundation. Contributors from different organizations, open-source projects, industry initiatives and independent companies develop the software and knowledge needed for secure, sovereign and interoperable data exchange in dataspaces.

Learn more about the community on the About Us page.

Eclipse Tractus-X started in the automotive industry. In 2023, the Catena-X consortia, with 32 partners from the automotive industry, made the initial contribution to the project and placed the foundations of the automotive dataspace in open source.

Today the Catena-X Association brings industry requirements, standards alignment and the Catena-X use-case ecosystem, while the shared software and KITs are developed in the open in Eclipse Tractus-X. See our history.

No. At the end of 2025 the project scope officially extended beyond the automotive industry and Catena-X. Initiatives such as Factory-X, Semiconductor-X and Construct-X collaborate in the project; the scope of each initiative’s involvement varies.

In February 2026, Factory-X contributed its open-source code and use-case deliverables, so Manufacturing-X working groups and other -X initiatives can build on them. See our ecosystem.

Eclipse Tractus-X operates under the Eclipse Foundation’s development process and intellectual property policies. It is part of the Eclipse automotive top-level project, whose Project Management Committee (PMC) approves committer and project lead elections as well as release and graduation reviews.

Committers decide what goes into the code base, and project leads are elected by the committers. The current lists are on the Eclipse project page; our summary of the project roles explains what each role does.

Yes. The project uses the Apache License 2.0 for code and Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY-4.0) for non-code content such as documentation, so you can use, adapt and build on it under the terms of these licenses.

Reference implementations, libraries, demonstrators and services for dataspaces. These include connectors, identity components, the Digital Twin Registry, the Portal, the Industry Core Hub and the Tractus-X SDK, alongside solutions for traceability, sustainability and supply chains.

Browse all of them in the product overview.

KIT is short for “Keep It Together”. A KIT is an open-source toolbox with comprehensive documentation that helps business teams, solution providers and developers build interoperable applications compatible with the Eclipse Tractus-X dataspace technologies, from architecture guidance and API specifications to reference implementations.

Start with KIT Getting Started or explore all KITs.

Every KIT has a lifecycle level: Sandbox for new ideas, Incubating while it is actively developed (with the sub-states Draft, In Progress and In Review) and Graduated once it has passed testing, expert validation and real-world case studies. KITs that are no longer maintained are marked Deprecated.

The KIT Lifecycle page explains the criteria of each level.

Eclipse Tractus-X collaborates with other Eclipse projects such as Eclipse Dataspace Components and Eclipse BaSyx, which provide reusable dataspace and digital twin technology. It also participates in the wider Eclipse dataspace ecosystem through the Eclipse Dataspace Working Group.

The tutorials show how to run the components. The Tractus-X Umbrella Helm Chart deploys a set of Tractus-X components into a local Kubernetes cluster, as a basis for end-to-end tests or a sandbox environment.

For developers, the Developer Hub collects further guides and links.

Tractus-X follows a quarterly release cycle, with releases typically in March, June, September and December. Releases are named R{YY}.{MM}, for example R24.03 for March 2024.

Read how a release is planned and tested in the release process, and what changed in the changelog.

Anyone who wants to. Companies, institutions and individual contributors take part. Contributing is more than code: documentation, opening and solving issues and answering questions on the public channels all count.

See the ways to take part on our contribution page.

You need a GitHub account with two-factor authentication and an Eclipse Foundation account with the same email address. Sign the Eclipse Contributor Agreement (ECA) and add your GitHub ID to your Eclipse profile. Without these accounts you only have read access.

The Getting Started guide walks you through every step.

Everybody with an Eclipse account and a signed ECA is a contributor. Official project contributors get the triage role on GitHub, so they can for example label, assign and close issues and pull requests. Committers have write access, review contributions and decide what goes into the code base; becoming a committer requires a demonstration of merit and an election.

Read more about the Eclipse project roles and the committer election process.

For quick questions, join the Tractus-X Matrix space. For a first contact with the community or a product team, write to the developer mailing list tractusx-dev@eclipse.org.

You can also meet the community in the open meetings, for example the weekly Community Office Hour on Fridays or the NewJoiner Office Hour.

Open an issue in the GitHub repository of the component. Working in public issues keeps development open and transparent, and documents decisions for everyone. See how to use the issue trackers.

Features for an upcoming release are planned together on the open release planning board.

Please do not report vulnerabilities in public GitHub issues. Open the Security tab of the affected repository and choose “Report a vulnerability” to create a private GitHub security advisory. In severe cases you can also contact the Eclipse Foundation Security Team.

The TRGs are the project’s shared defaults for workflows and requirements, for example on documentation, containers, Helm charts, security and open-source governance. They make it easier to contribute to, maintain and run components across Eclipse Tractus-X, and features of a release must follow them.

Browse all Release Guidelines.

All over the world. The Community Bases map shows the countries where the project has an established community presence, with the contributors, committers, adopters and partner organizations that build, run and promote Tractus-X locally.