As I mentioned on Monday, incubating projects now have the ability to start developing in parallel with the IP review and approval process. That’s clearly good news for all those new projects eager to get a fast start once they’ve been created.
In the same Board meeting where this new IP Policy was approved, there was also an important new directive from the Board to all Eclipse projects. You can see the resolution in full on our governance page. But basically there are three key points:
- Projects need to conform to a standard template for their website look-and-feel. This has been a sore point with our user community for quite a while, as there is a wide range of looks and quality of the various project sites. Hopefully bringing some order to this will help our community navigate our site.
- Each project which is in the incubation stage must use the incubation logo and clearly identify their website and downloads as such. (On a related note, some have expressed unhappiness with the incubator logo, so we may be having another design contest.)
- Projects need to start using the project-info.xml files to keep the community up-to-date on their status and activities.
So this is basically taking some stuff that the EMO has been encouraging projects to do and making it Board-supported policy.
Obviously implementing these requirements is going to take some time. Bjorn will be letting everyone know what the roll out plan is.
