Development Resources/New Commmitter Handbook

My Foundation Portal

The My Foundation Portal is the primary mechanism for committers to interact with the Eclipse Foundation. Using the portal, you can update your personal information, manage information about your project, nominate new committers, and more. New functionality is added on an ongoing basis. The portal presents functionality in the form of individual components. The set of components depends on the roles assigned to you.

You can use either your Eclipse Bugzilla or your committer credentials to login. Some committer-specific functionality is only available when you login using your committer credentials.

Licenses, Intellectual Property Due Diligence, and other Legal Stuff

The Eclipse Legal page is the main resource for legal matters. Janet Campbell, Legal Counsel & Intellectual Property Team Manager for the Eclipse Foundation, presented a talk, IP for Eclipse Committers, at EclipseCon 2009 that provides a great overview of the IP policy and process at Eclipse.

As an Eclipse Committer, you should be familiar with the Eclipse Public License (EPL). Further, you should be aware of the Eclipse Distribution License (EDL). By default all code authored for an Eclipse project is subject to the EPL. The BSD-style EDL license is used by some Eclipse projects which require dual-licensing along with the EPL. Use of this license by an Eclipse project is on a case-by-case basis and requires unanimous approval of the Board of Directors.

Managing intellectual property is an important part of being an Eclipse Committer. All committers should be familiar with the Intellectual Property Due Diligence process. Any time you accept code from any party (committer or non-committer), you should consult this poster to determine what course of action to take. As a general rule, code created on an ongoing basis by committers for an Eclipse project can simply be committed into the project's source code repository.

Any library authored by a third-party that you intend to distribute from any eclipse.org resource, including those licensed under the EPL or EDL, are subject to the process. The Guidelines for the Review of Third Party Dependencies provides some guidance on dealing with these third party libraries.

Code contributions of other forms from a third-party should be made through Eclipse Bugzilla. This includes things like patches, lines of code, or files. Any contributions made through Bugzilla are subject to the Eclipse Terms of Use which, among other things, implicitly grants us the right to use the contribution. Contributions of all forms are subject to the process (not just source files).

The entry-point into the Eclipse IP Due Diligence Process is the Contribution Questionnaire (CQ). CQs are tracked in a separate Bugzilla instance known as IPZilla. Only committers and other authorized individuals may access IPZilla.

You should create a CQ using the My Foundation Portal. By using the portal, you are given an opportunity to locate similar existing CQs; by leveraging an existing CQ, you may be able to hasten the approval process. The CQ describes the contribution, including important information like the license under which it is distributed and identity of the various authors. Once your CQ is created, you must attach the source code for the library to the record. Do not attach binaries. A separate CQ is required for each library.

Do not commit any contribution to your project's source code repository until the CQ is explicitly marked as approved and a comment is added by the IP Due Diligence Team that explicitly states that you can commit the contribution.

An incubating project may make use of the Parallel IP Process. Using the Parallel IP Process, a contribution can be committed into a project's source code repository while the due diligence process is undertaken. If, at the end of the due diligence process, the contribution is rejected, it must be removed from the source code repository. The Parallel IP Process "How to" page provides some insight. Mature projects can take advantage of the parallel IP process for certain libraries.

Projects are encouraged, where possible, to reuse libraries found in the Orbit project. Leveraging these libraries will help to reduce redundancy across Eclipse projects.

If you are unsure about what you need to do or have other questions, ask your PMC.