Blogs

Intellectual Property Policy Changes Implementation

The Eclipse Foundation’s Intellectual Property (IP) Policy was recently updated and we’re in the process of updating our processes and support infrastructure to accommodate the changes. With the updated IP Policy, we introduced the notion of Type A (license certified) and Type B (license certified, provenance checked, and scanned) due diligence types for third-party dependencies that projects can opt to adopt.

The micro:bit is one of the best IoT prototyping platforms I’ve come across in the past few months.

Long-time Eclipse Committer, Ian Bull initiated a interesting short chat on Twitter yesterday about one big challenge when it comes to intellectual property (IP) management. Ian asked about the implications of somebody forking an open source project, changing the license in that fork, and then distributing the work under that new license.

With the changes in the Eclipse Intellectual Property (IP) Policy made in 2016, the Eclipse Foundation now offers two types of IP Due Diligence for the third-party software used by a project. Our Type A Due Diligence involves a license certification only and our Type B Due Diligence provides our traditional license certification, provenance check, and code scan for various sorts of anomalies.

As we are wrapping up the year, it is a good time to reflect on all the great things that have happened to the Eclipse IoT community this year.

2016 has been an incredible year for the IoT industry and the pace of innovation looks like it will accelerate in 2017. Last week I participated in a webinar, organized by Canonical, on the IoT trends to watch in 2017. It was a really good discussion, so feel free to listen to the recording.  I think it would also be interesting to summarize some of the 2017 trends I see in the IoT industry and specifically in the Eclipse IoT community.

A couple of days ago, Google announced that they were essentially rebranding Brillo to Android Things (I do love that name, by the way!), and finally opening it for a Developer Preview.

The third edition of the Open IoT Challenge officially started one week ago. More than 80 teams have submitted their entries and are now in the running to win the Open IoT Challenge 3.0!

Participants have about three months to complete their solution and show the world how open source and open standards can help build innovative IoT solutions. On February 27, they will have to submit their final project report and hope that their work ends up in the top 3 winning solutions.