Wayne Beaton's blog

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 Eclipse Foundation Specification Process (EFSP) was authored as an extension to the Eclipse Development Process (EDP). With this in mind, before we can discuss the EFSP, we’ll start with a quick EDP primer. At a high (and very simplified) level, the EDP looks a little something like this: All...

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...

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...

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. Running an open source project is easy. All you have...

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...

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...