Recent content on Wayne Beaton
Eclipse Collections is a wonderful library for Java developers that provides a rich… uh… collection (set? list? bag?) of data structures and algorithms that will serve your every need. Eclipse Collections offers alternatives to the standard Java Collections Framework with a focus on memory efficiency and speed; using Eclipse Collections will improve the performance in your applications and…
Originally posted in the the February 2019 Eclipse Foundation Newsletter.
The Eclipse Foundation Specification Process (EFSP), which extends the Eclipse Foundation Development Process (EDP), defines a blueprint for collaborating on specification development in open source.
Committers are the ones who tend to develop most of the content. Committers have the ability to push their own…
Originally posted on January 27, 2020
The Eclipse Foundation Development Process (EDP) says nothing about how teams should organise.
The EDP defines a committer role: committers are those developers who have the ability to make decisions for the project (e.g., push commits to project Git repositories and configure build servers). We often say that the committers are the ones with the real…
The 2022 update to the Eclipse Foundation’s IP Policy, approved by the Board of Directors in June 2022, resulted in the following changes:
The Eclipse Public License is no longer special. The Eclipse Foundation was originally conceived as a single-license foundation, but that hasn’t been true for a very long time. With this change, we acknowledge that our open source projects leverage a…
All Eclipse open source projects are required to operate in an open and transparent manner. This includes communication: all communication between and with the project team uses open channels. Specifically, we have no private channels for open source project work. Related, we don’t facilitate private communication between project team members and the community. If you want to connect with an…
If an Eclipse open source project team wants to include the community in a vote to, say, decide what functionality to include in the code base or decide whether or not they’re ready to do a release, that’s entirely up to the project team. If a project team wants to include the community in decisions (e.g., “do we implement X or Y?”), they’re free to do so. Personally,…
The Eclipse Foundation community awards are returning once again! The Eclipse Foundation has a vibrant community of many dedicated individuals, who deserve to be recognized for their contributions.
To recognize our community members, we will be presenting awards for Top Committer, Top Newcomer Evangelist, Top Contributor, and Lifetime Achievement at EclipseCon 2022.
As these are community…
The Eclipse Dash License Tool identifies the licenses of content. It is intended primarily for use by Eclipse committers to vet third party content used by their Eclipse open source project.
The license tool has a Maven plugin that you can use find license information for all of your Maven project’s dependencies. That is, the Maven plugin can identify the entire transitive closure of…
As a member of the Eclipse Foundation, you already know the value of making a project open source. Open source allows organizations to participate in a thriving developer community, while sharing the costs of innovation and focusing their resources on building differentiated features that customers value.
However, all open source organizations are not created equal and certain objectives will…
Here’s a scenario: you work for an organization that contributes to open source and you’ve hired a developer to work on your favourite open source project. You need to make them a committer. How do you do that?
I get this sort of request every so often: “we’ve hired so-and-so and we need you to make them a committer, m’kay?”. The short answer is: no.
The…
Originally posted on October 26/2017. 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 published in the All Eyes on Open Source issue of JAX Magazine.
Running an open source project is easy. All you have to do is make your source code available and you’re open source, right? Well, maybe.…
The Eclipse Foundation Development Process (EDP) describes a release as anything that is distributed for adoption outside of the committers of a project (effectively, if you stamp something with a version number and tell the general audience to download it, it’s a release). Appropriately labeled nightly, integration, and milestone builds are not considered releases.
Further, the EDP…
Scientific progress goes “boink”? – Hobbes
The Eclipse Foundation Specification Process (EFSP) provides a framework and governance model for developers engaged in the process of developing specifications.
Specification: A specification is a collection of related artifacts.
The EFSP defines a specification as a “collection of Application Programming Interface…
The Eclipse Foundation community awards are back for 2021! The Eclipse Foundation has a vibrant community of many dedicated individuals, who deserve to be recognized for their contributions. To recognize our community members, we will be presenting awards for Top Committer, Top Newcomer Evangelist, Top Contributor, and Lifetime Achievement at EclipseCon 2021.
As these are community awards, we…
Dropping barriers to open up opportunities for contribution is a critical activity for Eclipse open source projects.
Ideally, Eclipse open source project teams should be actively soliciting contribution, growing participation in the project, and otherwise being good open source citizens. Minimally, though, Eclipse project teams must engage in practices that make is so that when potential…
Intellectual property management is important for Eclipse projects. As a committer, you are our first line of defense when it comes to identifying and mitigating intellectual property issues.
Over the past year or so, you’ve likely heard and seen rumblings of some of the innovations that we’ve been making in this space. The Eclipse IP Team has been working with individual project…
The Eclipse Foundation has a policy regarding the resolution and responsible disclosure of identified vulnerabilities. The short version is that this is one of the rare areas where open source transparency and openness ideals may be curtailed for a period of time while a vulnerability is addressed privately; but that all identified vulnerabilities, regardless of whether or not they are fixed, must…
The Eclipse Foundation is a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) Numbering Authority.
Eclipse project committers can use the tools that best suit their needs to remediate their vulnerability, provided that–when disclosed–related issues are tracked via the official (open and transparent) project issue tracker. To the extent possible, tools used to remediate a vulnerability…
Good news! Contributor Matt Booth has created a Maven plugin for the Eclipse Dash License Tool.
The first step is to clone the repository and run the build:
$ git clone git@github.com:eclipse-dash/dash-licenses.git $ cd dash-licenses $ mvn clean install This will install the plugin into your local Maven cache. With that in place, you can navigate over to your own project directory and…
Originally posted on August 2, 2017
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…
The hard parts of contributing to an Eclipse open source project are the same hard parts that you’ll have with any open source project.
You need to find an open source project to contribute to, identify and connect with the communication channels, learn enough about the code base to make informed decisions, and determine where your expertise is best applied. Communication is the key. You need…
Originally posted on January 13, 2012
The Eclipse Foundation Development Process (EDP) defines–in its section on principles–three open source rules of engagement: Openness, Transparency, and Meritocracy:
Open – Eclipse is open to all; Eclipse provides the same opportunity to all. Everyone participates with the same rules; there are no rules to exclude any potential contributors which…
Eclipse open source project teams are required to maintain a record of intellectual property contributions. We refer to this as the IP Log
As part of the release review process, Eclipse project teams submit their IP Log for review by the Eclipse IP Team. For many years, Eclipse project teams have depended on the IP Log Generator to provide that record. With the recent changes in our process,…
One of the benefits of hosting your open source project at the Eclipse Foundation is the Eclipse Foundation’s Intellectual Property (IP) Policy and the IP Due Diligence Process that supports it. Eclipse project team are responsible for tracking their own IP and for ensuring that all third-party content is compatible with the the project licenses.
When the licensing of third-party content…
Revised on September 22/2020
There’s background information about this post in my previous post. I’ve been using the Eclipse Dash License Tool on itself.
$ mvn dependency:list | grep -Poh "\S+:(system_031|provided|compile)$" | java -jar licenses.jar - Querying Eclipse Foundation for license data for 7 items. Found 6 items. Querying ClearlyDefined for license data for 1 items. Found 1…
In October 2019, The Eclipse Foundation’s Board of Directors approved an update to the IP Policy that introduces several significant changes in our IP due diligence process. I’ve just pushed out an update to the Intellectual Property section in the Eclipse Foundation Project Handbook.
I’ll apologize in advance that the updates are still a little rough and require some refinements. Like the…
Revised on September 22/2020
The Eclipse Foundation’s board of directors approved an update to the Eclipse Foundation’s Intellectual Property (IP) Policy in October 2019. With help from some of our open source project teams and the Eclipse Architecture Council, we’ve been defining, refining, and rolling out updates to our corresponding IP due diligence process and supporting services. A big…