Difference between revisions of "Development Resources/HOWTO/Starting A New Project"

Revision as of 13:55, 12 August 2010

Before you propose a new project at Eclipse, make sure that you understand the value proposition. Eclipse is more than just a place for hosting code; Eclipse is very much about community, adoption, and eco-system. Projects are expected to take necessary precautions to mitigate the risk to adopters; a company that integrates the code from your Eclipse project, for example, does so with confidence that the code in your project can legally be distributed under the agreed-to terms. The processes that we have in place are designed to support this.

Ensure that you are familiar with the Eclipse Development Process (EDP), Eclipse IP Policy, and IP Due Diligence Process.

The EDP is mostly about community involvement. An Eclipse project is considered successful only if a vibrant community develops around it. While the reviews and processes described by the EDP may seem onerous, they are a necessary part of community development. You should anticipate spending a significant amount of time responding to questions posed in various forums (Eclipse Forums, mailing lists, or even Stack Overflow. You should plan on attending conferences (especially Eclipse Summit Europe and EclipseCon), presenting webinars, writing papers, etc to support your project.

There is tremendous value in the Eclipse IP Policy, but that value comes at a cost. It is important that you understand what is involved. Code provenance tracking is critical (we need to know the source of all code that ends up in our repositories). To that end, all new projects are required to make an initial contribution before any code is committed to an Eclipse source code repository. The Eclipse IP Team will review your initial contribution to ensure that the code can distributed through an eclipse.org property. In effect, we review to code to make sure that it hasn't been copied inappropriately, that licenses are being used correctly, and so forth. As part of this process, the IP Team will research the source of all code; depending on the size of your contribution, this can be a time-consuming process. Furthermore, any third-party libraries required by your code will have to be checked and approved by the IP Team.

Again, this should sound like a lot of work.

Here are some other links that should help you with the process:

• Project Naming Policy;
• Pre-Proposal Phase - The whole process for proposing a project;
• Architecture Council - The role of the Architecture Council in a new project;
• Creation Reviews - Scheduling the proposal's creation review; and
• Incubation Phase - After the project has been created.