Eclipse 101

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...

While it’s true that most Eclipse projects use the Eclipse Public License, many Eclipse open source projects use alternative licenses either alone or in combination. The chart below shows the relative use of various license schemes by Eclipse open source projects: Note that we use SPDX expression. In SPDX, license...

Scientific progress goes “boink”? – Hobbes The Eclipse Foundation Specification Process (EFSP) provides a framework and governance model for developers engaged in the process of developing specifications. Specification : A specification is a collection of related artifacts. The EFSP defines a specification as a “collection of Application Programming Interface (API)...

On December 7/2018, the Eclipse Foundation’s Board of Directors approved a new edition of the Eclipse Development Process (EDP) which introduces one particularly significant change, along with a small number of other useful changes. We rolled this new edition out on December 14/2018. Note that project teams who are familiar...

The Eclipse Foundation Specification Process (EFSP) includes an image that provides an overview of what goes into creating a new Specification Project. By creating, we mean the process of taking a Specification from an initial idea or concept through to the point where the necessary resources and permissions are in...

The Eclipse Foundation Specification Process defines a general framework for developing specifications in open source at the Eclipse Foundation; it extends the Eclipse Development Process (EDP) by adding a few extra checks and balances. In the first installment of this series, we described the EDP; in this second installment, we...

The primary role of the Eclipse IP Team is to reduce the risks associated with adopting open source software. In broad terms, they ensure that the licenses on content are compatible, that provenance is clear, and that content otherwise unencumbered from a legal point-of-view (strictly speaking, the team does all...

To say that bringing Jakarta EE to life at the Eclipse Foundation was a massive undertaking is a gross understatement. We started this effort in early 2018. Today, we have 39 open source projects (as part of the EE4J Top Level Project) representing 14% of our overall project space. These...

The Eclipse Architecture Council is in the process of making a change to how the Eclipse Development Process (EDP) defines the Reviews that Eclipse open source projects are required to engage in. Foremost on our minds is the nature of Release Reviews which the EDP current requires ahead of all...

In the world of open source, Committers are ones who hold they keys. Committers decide what code goes into the code base, they decide how a project builds, and they ultimately decide what gets delivered to the adopter community. With awesome power, comes awesome responsibility, and so it’s no mistake...