As  a member of the Eclipse Foundation, you already know the value of making a project open source. Open source allows organizations to participate in a thriving developer community, while sharing the costs of innovation and focusing their resources on building differentiated features that customers value.  However, all open source organizations are not created equal and certain objectives will be better met by partnering with one that best aligns with your organizational needs. For example, if your objective is to drive broad adoption with commercial-friendly production ready code ..read more

There’s background information about this post in my previous post. I’ve been using the Eclipse Dash License Tool on itself. $ mvn dependency:list | grep -Poh "\S+:(system|provided|compile)$" | java -jar licenses.jar - Querying Eclipse Foundation for license data for 7 items. Found 6 items. Querying ClearlyDefined for license data for 1 items. Found 1 items. Vetted license information was found for all content. No further investigation is required. $ _ Note that in this example, I’ve removed the paths to try and reduce at least some of the clutter. I also tend to add a filter to sort the dep ..read more

In October 2019, The Eclipse Foundation’s Board of Directors approved an update to the IP Policy that introduces several significant changes in our IP due diligence process. I’ve just pushed out an update to the Intellectual Property section in the Eclipse Foundation Project Handbook. I’ll apologize in advance that the updates are still a little rough and require some refinements. Like the rest of the handbook, we continually revise and rework the content based on your feedback. Here’s a quick summary of the most significant changes. License certification only for third-party content. Thi ..read more

The Eclipse Foundation’s board of directors approved an update to the Eclipse Foundation’s Intellectual Property (IP) Policy in October 2019. With help from some of our open source project teams and the Eclipse Architecture Council, we’ve been defining, refining, and rolling out updates to our corresponding IP due diligence process and supporting services. A big part of this update is a change in the way that we will manage third party content. In the context of the Eclipse IP Policy, “third party content” is content that is leveraged by the Eclipse open source project, but not otherwise produ ..read more

Committers are the developers who hold the keys for an open source project. They are the ones who get to push code directly to source code repositories, configure build servers, push the output of builds to the download server, and so on. They are the ones who make decisions that set the path of their open source project. Committers have another important role: turning contributors into committers. All committers should plan to spend some significant amount of their time interacting with contributors to whip their contributions into shape, working community forums to court contribution to the ..read more

This post is brought to you today by the Eclipse EGit Project. Eclipse EGit is the Eclipse open source project that provides Git integration for the Eclipse Platform. On Eclipse open source project pages (which we often refer to as the Project Management Interface or “PMI”), the “Who’s Involved” pages include some commit activity graphs. The Contribution Activity chart shows the absolute number of commits made on project repositories over the last twelve months. Eclipse open source projects may have multiple Git repositories; this chart shows commit activity across all branches on a ..read more

We identified a hole in our committer agreement process that excluded individuals with a certain employment status from participating in Eclipse Foundation open source specification projects operating under the Eclipse Foundation Specification Process (EFSP). I’ll start by saying that you don’t need to be a committer to contribute to an open source specification project (in fact, notwithstanding the initial bootstrapping of a new open source project team, you cannot become a committer without first demonstrating merit as a contributor). If you just want to make a contribution in the form (f ..read more

The Eclipse Foundation Development Process (AKA, the Eclipse Development Process or EDP) says nothing about how teams should organize.  The EDP defines a committer role: committers are those developers who have the ability to make decisions for the project (e.g., push commits to project Git repositories and configure build servers). We often say that the committers are the ones with the real power: they’re the ones that hold all of the keys to all of the project resources. With great power comes great responsibility, so we have a well-defined process by which a contributor may demonstra ..read more

One of the key roles of he Eclipse Architecture Council is to maintain the Eclipse Development Process (EDP). Maintenance usually takes the form of an update every year or so. Updates to the EDP are approved by the Eclipse Board of Directors. The Architecture Council records issues that need to be addressed and tracks the work in the Community/Architecture component in the Eclipse Foundation’s Bugzilla instance. The update to the EDP in late 2018 changed the way that we engage in release reviews. Project teams only need to engage in a release review for releases that occur more than one yea ..read more

The Eclipse Foundation has several agreements that we use to ensure that contributors understand the terms by which they make their contributions and, especially, to give them an opportunity to assert that they have the necessary rights to make those contributions under the terms of the corresponding project license. The Eclipse Contributor Agreement (ECA) must be signed by anybody who wants to contribute to an Eclipse open source software or specification project. When a contributor has signed the ECA, a committer will be able to merge a contributor’s pull requests. Another way of looking ..read more