Intellectual Property

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

I’ll start this discussion with some background… Under the original Eclipse Foundation Intellectual Property (IP) Policy, every bit of third party content needed to be thoroughly reviewed before it could be used by an Eclipse project. And the reviews were thorough: license scan, provenance check, scan for anomalies, … Reviews...

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...

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...

The Eclipse Foundation is in the process of making a major update to our Intellectual Property Policy. 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...

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...