mmilinkovich's blog

Today the Eclipse Foundation celebrates its 10th birthday. Boy, time flies when you’re having fun!

It is very hard to put your mind back to an event in the past. I don’t mean simply remembering the event; that’s easy. What is hard is to recall what the environment was really like at the time, without the context of all of the subsequent history.

I spent last week at JavaOne in San Francisco, and I thought I would share a few things about the event that might be of interest to the Eclipse community.

The Eclipse Foundation is going to start allowing its projects to host their mainline development on third party forges such as GitHub, and (eventually) Bitbucket. This means that an Eclipse project will be able to leverage the great development tools provided by those vendors. The first project that we are going to work with on this is Vert.x, which has been hosted on GitHub since its inception. Our intent is to start small, and continually improve this program and our support of it.

As we started talking about back in February, the Eclipse Foundation is doing a major overhaul of our IP processes. With the Kepler release now firmly in its end-game, the time has come to start rolling this out.

In February, I identified three major pieces of work that needed to get done:

The Eclipse Public License, and its predecessor the Common Public License have been in existence for around 12 years now. A lot has changed since the EPL’s introduction in 2004, and the time has come for a review to ensure it remains current. As a result, we are going to kick off a public process to solicit input on the license, and discuss possible revisions.

Yesterday’s announcement of the OpenDaylight project has gotten very wide coverage. It looks like a well-done announcement, and the industry support for this important new collaboration is stellar. Yet another great example of how open source is facilitating collaboration on new and innovative industry platforms.

A few weeks ago, I talked about a major overhaul of our IP processes. As part of that, we have posted our Public Review Drafts of our Eclipse Foundation Contributor License Agreement (CLA) and our Contributor’s Certificate of Originality (CoO).

I’m very happy to announce that we are going to be making some fairly significant changes to the workflows and processes around how contributions flow into Eclipse projects, and how Eclipse committers will process them. The good news is that we think that the new approaches are going to make things a lot easier for everyone.

I am very happy to report that after a little bit of conversation, the JRuby project has moved from the Common Public License (CPL) to the Eclipse Public License (EPL). So as of this moment, JRuby is tri-licensed under the EPL/LGPL/GPL. This is an excellent reminder to all remaining CPL-licensed projects (hello JUnit! – discussion thread here) to consider re-licensing under the EPL.

Well, December 21st is here and the the apocalypse didn’t happen! But it’s still a big day at Eclipse because today at 12:00 noon, Eastern Time, our webmaster team of Denis and Matt started the process of turning CVS into a read-only service.