Friends of Eclipse is a successful program to allow individuals in the greater Eclipse community to contribute back to Eclipse.   Not everyone has the time or the ability to contribute code, write documentation, write tutorials or even open bugs but lots of people have been happy to contribute $35 to be a Friend of Eclipse.  Right now we have 494 Friends of Eclipse and of course we would like more. 

Therefore, we are starting a new campaign to recruit 360 Friends of Helios.  Eclipse 3.6 is part of the Helios release, so we thought 360 new Friends would be a good goal.  Last year we ran a recruitment campaign for Galileo that resulted in 137 new Friends.    This year we are being a lot more aggressive in our goal but I know the community won’t let us down.    To keep track of our progress we have created a Friends of Helios status bar.

A fun benefit of being a Friend of Eclipse is that you will get early access to the Helios release.  This gives you instant bragging rights with your friends and colleagues.    Please consider joining now and help support our drive for 360 Friends of Helios.

For those that like the small print, we will count friends that join from May 1 to July 31th towards our 360 target.   We will also count towards the target individuals that renew their Friends membership during this time period.

From http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com/2010/05/12/wanted-360-friends-of-helios/