Wayne Beaton's blog

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.

The term Intellectual Property (IP) refers to any sort of creative work, be it literature, art, or software. In the realm of open source software, artifacts like source code, documentation, and images are considered intellectual property. Unless otherwise stated, intellectual property is the property of its creator, who may grant permission for others to use that intellectual property by providing a license.

This post is based on a talk that Gunnar Wagenknecht and I delivered at the Open Source Leadership Summit 2017 and Devoxx US 2017. This content was recently published in the All Eyes on Open Source issue of JAX Magazine.

In 2016, we introduced the notion of license certification intellectual property (IP) due diligence (“Type A”) into the Eclipse IP Policy with a goal in mind to automate the certification process. At that time, we started a process of evaluating tools that could be used for automatic validation and eventually discovered Scancode.

Late last week, I pushed out an update to our documentation regarding the legal documentation requirements for Eclipse projects that Sharon Corbett and I have been working on over the past quarter. In the process, we moved the guidelines off of the main website and rolled them in to the Eclipse Project Handbook. Our primary goal in revising this documentation was to make it more generally applicable to all open source projects and bring us more in line with what the rest of the open source world does.

Update: Note that as of October 11/2017, Java 9 is 100% supported “out of the box” by Eclipse IDE, Oxygen Edition; Java 9 can be used to run your Eclipse IDE, Oxygen Edition, and can be used to build Java 9 applications without additional configuration. Download or update today.

Update: Note that as of October 11/2017, Java 9 is 100% supported “out of the box” by Eclipse IDE, Oxygen Edition; Java 9 can be used to run your Eclipse IDE, Oxygen Edition, and can be used to build Java 9 applications without additional configuration. Download or update today.

For many open source organisations, open means the same thing as transparent: open as in open book. At the Eclipse Foundation, we regard being transparent as the practice of making sure that the community can see and understand what the project is doing; and being open as the act of giving up absolute control and welcoming the community to participate as an equal player on a level playing field (i.e. being open to participation by the others).

If you’re new to the Eclipse IDE you’re already a big fan, you’ll find something of value every day by following @EclipseJavaIDE.  Frankly, there’s so much good stuff coming out of this account, that it’s hard to pick any favourites. So, I’ve pulled out a couple of recent ones.

The Eclipse Intellectual Property Policy defines two types of intellectual property (IP) due diligence for third party content. The so-called Type A Due Diligence is concerned exclusively with license certification; and Type B Due Diligence is concerned with license certification, provenance checking and a deep dive scan of the content for various anomalies.

Regarding the analysis of Type A third party content, the IP Policy makes this statement: