Sharon Corbett drafted this message that the IP Team has been posting on some of our CQs. I’d like to share it more broadly.
The Eclipse Board of Directors approved changes to the Eclipse Intellectual Property Policy on October 21, 2019. The most significant change relates to how we will perform due diligence of leveraged Third Party Content (Section IV B).
Motivation and Background:
The Eclipse IP Policy and Procedures date back to 2004. While we have made significant changes over time, we cannot support agile development nor continuous delivery. Further, it’s impossible to scale to modern day technology such as Node.JS, Electron, NPM, etc. Additionally, our process for third party content is burdensome and lacks automation.
License Compliance of Third Party Content:
The change removes the requirement to perform deep copyright, provenance and scanning of anomalies for Third Party Content unless it is being modified and/or if there are “special” considerations regarding the package. Instead, the focus for this content will be on license compliance only, which many of you know today as Type A. Reminder, please note that this will not impact how we handle project code and/or modified third party code. Full due diligence review will remain in place for this content. This change applies to THIRD PARTY Content only.
Futures:
We are currently working on tooling to provide to Eclipse projects so that in the near future, Eclipse projects will perform these license compliance checks allowing projects to only check in with the IP Team to file a CQ when/if the project encounters IP violations or restrictions with respect to its Third Party Content. We estimate this tooling will be available by the end of the year.
We ask for your patience while we use existing infrastructure to roll out these changes with further automation being planned. We will need to change documentation, front end changes, etc. More information will be forthcoming on this topic.
These efforts are in support of our community and we will work with you as we continue to move forward with this new modernization effort.