I have some very good news for new projects at Eclipse. At the board meeting last week, an important revision to the Eclipse Intellectual Property Policy was approved. Under the new revision, projects which are in incubation — and which are clearly marking their webpages and downloads as such — can now start to have their IP submissions approved while they are working on the code, rather than waiting for prior approval.
So how does this work? All projects still have to submit contribution questionnaires. The difference is that once a CQ has been reviewed for license compatibility, an incubating project will be authorized via IPzilla to check in the code to CVS and start working on it.
IP due diligence will need to be completed before the project can ship anything labeled as a release candidate or release.
Hopefully this will help us avoid past scenarios where new projects have had to wait for a long time for IP approvals in order to get started!
