This post is meant to clear up some misunderstandings that occurred during a discussion thread on the Jakarta EE Community mailing list. Some of this is a repetition of what I described in Jakarta EE 9 Shaping Up in December, but such an important topic cannot be stressed enough.
The only thing you need in order to contribute to Jakarta EE specifications is a signed ECA!
First of all, to contribute to any open source project at the Eclipse Foundation, you will need to create an account and sign the Eclipse Contributor Agreement (ECA). See below for a visualization of this process.
That’s it!
You can now start contributing by submitting Pull Requests to the projects you are interested in, including Jakarta EE specification projects. It doesn’t cost anything. No signatures from your employer are necessary. Just the ECA. The only thing you need in order to contribute to Jakarta EE specifications is a signed ECA!
The more you contribute, the more likely it is that you will be proposed to become a committer to the project. I will describe the zero-cost way of becoming a committer in a follow-up post to this one.