Eclipse Contributor License Agreements Are Live
As we started talking about back in February, the Eclipse Foundation is doing a major overhaul of our IP processes. With the Kepler release now firmly in its end-game, the time has come to start rolling this out.
In February, I identified three major pieces of work that needed to get done:
- First, we are going to implement Contributor License Agreements (CLAs) for all contributors at Eclipse. The CLA will be a short document that essentially asks The Three Questions once. We will collect some information about the contributor so that we have a record on file of who is giving us code or documentation. Note that the Eclipse Foundation CLA will be quite different from those in use at other organizations. For example, Apache’s CLAs basically give the ASF a license equivalent to ownership for contributions. The Oracle Contributor Agreement (OCA) used by OpenJDK community gives Oracle joint ownership of contributions. The Eclipse CLA is much more modest. In terms of licenses, all it says is that the contributor agrees that their contributions will be provided under the license(s) for the project they’re contributing to. You can review and discuss the draft CLA on bug 401349.
- Second, we are going to support signed-off-by for contributions which flow to Eclipse project via git and Gerrit. The goal here is to make it as simple as possible for Eclipse projects to accept contributions via the community best practices which have grown up around git. As part of this, we will be developing a contributor certificate of originality, inspired by the one used by the Linux community.
- And finally, we are going to automate as much of this workflow as possible. Our CLAs will be presented and completed on-line. There will be Gerrit support so committers get an immediate indication as to whether a contributor has a CLA on file. There will be git triggers which will reject a commit where there is no CLA on file for the author of the code commit.
Ever since then, we’ve been working on getting all of the pieces lined up to go live with these capabilities. Today is the first step!
The Eclipse Contributor License Agreement is now live. This means that contributors can execute a CLA, and get theirs on file. Committers will be able to use the PMI (project management infrastructure) to look up whether a particular contributor has a CLA on file. So starting immediately, you will be able to refer to a CLA rather than asking the “three questions” on a bug. This is basically delivering on the first item above.
For the second item, the Eclipse Foundation Contributor’s Certificate of Origin has been published, and contributors and committers should start using the signed-by option with git.
In order for a contributor to sign their CLA, they need to do the following:
- Obtain and Eclipse Foundation userid. Anyone who currently uses our Bugzilla or Gerrit systems already has one of those. If they don’t, they need to register.
- Login into the projects portal, select “My Account”, and then the “Contributor License Agreement” tab.
Navigate to the CLA
The day after Kepler ships — Thursday, June 27th — we will deliver on the third item, which is automation. On that day, we will start automatically enforcing CLAs. This means that every time a contribution arrives at one of our git repositories (including Gerrit), the author field will be checked to ensure that there is a CLA or Committer Agreement on file for the author. If there isn’t, the contribution will be rejected.
Progress!
Community Review of the Eclipse Public License
The Eclipse Public License, and its predecessor the Common Public License have been in existence for around 12 years now. A lot has changed since the EPL’s introduction in 2004, and the time has come for a review to ensure it remains current. As a result, we are going to kick off a public process to solicit input on the license, and discuss possible revisions. Once we’ve arrived at a set of revisions which have a broad support, the Eclipse Foundation Board of Directors would have to unanimously approve the new version. And, of course, any revisions would be submitted to the Open Source Initiative to have them certified as compliant with the Open Source Definition.
I don’t want to steer the conversation in any particular direction, but as a sampler of issues, here are a couple:
- The distinction drawn between object code and source code aren’t really helpful when you’re talking about scripting languages like JavaScript.
- The use of the term “module” is confusing to some.
There are a few things that we already know we don’t want to change. First and foremost is that the EPL will remain a copyleft license. Another is that we want to continue to enable a commercially-licensed ecosystem based on Eclipse technologies.
We are going to be starting these discussions soon on the epl-discuss@eclipse.org mailing list (subscribe here), and will be tracking individual issues in the Eclipse Foundation/Community/License component in the Eclipse bugzilla.
If you are interested in the future of Eclipse licensing, please join in the conversation!
The EPL as a Platform License
Yesterday’s announcement of the OpenDaylight project has gotten very wide coverage. It looks like a well-done announcement, and the industry support for this important new collaboration is stellar. Yet another great example of how open source is facilitating collaboration on new and innovative industry platforms.
In my opinion, one important detail of the announcement has not received sufficient notice:
OpenDaylight … is structured and governed using open source best practices and is licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL)…
So OpenDaylight is flying in the face of a lot of recent conventional wisdom that the Apache License is the default license of choice for new industry collaborations. (See here here and here.) Frankly, I thought I would see pigs fly before seeing Microsoft fully participating in an EPL-licensed open source community.
I think that this could be the start of a new trend, because as we’ve seen platform fragmentation in the Android ecosystem is becoming bit of an object lesson for the industry.
The EPL has a couple of really important features that make it a particularly good platform license. It strikes the perfect balance between the competing interests of the collaborative community who is building the code, and the commercial interests who want to use that code in their products and services.
- The EPL is copyleft, which means that if a company forks the code to further their interests, they need to make that code available under the EPL. This is a powerful incentive to simply do the work in the main project, in collaboration with the other players.
- The EPL is commercially friendly, allowing corporations to build products on top of EPL-licensed code and use their own End User License Agreement when selling to their customers. This provides the ability for companies to leverage EPL-licensed open source code in traditional software business models.
The combinations of those two main features has been a big part of the success of the Eclipse community. We’ve seen remarkably few forks at Eclipse (aka fragmentation), while enjoying massive amounts of commercial adoption of our technologies. Will the OpenDaylight announcement make other industry open source collaborations think a little bit harder about their license choices? Time will tell, but I think this could be an interesting trend to watch.
Public Review Drafts of New IP Documents Now Posted
A few weeks ago, I talked about a major overhaul of our IP processes. As part of that, we have posted our Public Review Drafts of our Eclipse Foundation Contributor License Agreement (CLA) and our Contributor’s Certificate of Originality (CoO).
I was asked why we needed both documents. I will repeat the explanation here:
The two documents are complementary.
The CLA is something that a contributor signs, and is a legal agreement.
The CoO is a statement that clarifies what we expect from contributors when they use the “signed-off-by” feature in git.
There is a saying that many lawyers use: “belts and suspenders”. Yes, there is some overlap between these two approaches, but there since the DCO is not something that a contributor is expected to sign, I don’t think that it adds any extra burden to the process.
Your comments and feedback would be greatly appreciated. However, please don’t do it in the comments here. We would prefer the community’s feedback on bug 401349.
Update: s/DCO/CoO/ in blockquote.
A Major Overhaul of Eclipse’s IP Process: CLAs, signed-off-by and more
I’m very happy to announce that we are going to be making some fairly significant changes to the workflows and processes around how contributions flow into Eclipse projects, and how Eclipse committers will process them. The good news is that we think that the new approaches are going to make things a lot easier for everyone. For more details, you can take a look at the presentation I did at a recent Architecture Council meeting.
First, a quick summary of how contributions come into Eclipse today.
- A contributor makes some changes to an Eclipse project and sends them to Eclipse for review and acceptance by an Eclipse committer. The first complication is that there are several different ways that can happen: contributions can come as push to Gerrit, or a patch in Bugzilla. Which means that the conversations about contributions can occur in multiple places.
- Assuming the committer likes the contribution and wants to take it, they are then required to ask the contributor “The Three Questions” on either Gerrit or Bugzilla. The Three Questions are:
- Did you author 100% of the content you’re contributing?
- Do you have the rights to contribute this content to Eclipse?
- Are you willing to contribute the content under the project’s license(s) (e.g. EPL)
The problem with this approach is that it’s very manual, error prone, and annoying. In particular, asking a prolific contributor the same three questions each and every time they try to help you out is just not helpful. It is particularly annoying in the context of the normal git workflows, where there there are numerous conventions for dealing with contributions.
So here’s how we are going to make it better:
- First, we are going to implement Contributor License Agreements (CLAs) for all contributors at Eclipse. The CLA will be a short document that essentially asks The Three Questions once. We will collect some information about the contributor so that we have a record on file of who is giving us code or documentation. Note that the Eclipse Foundation CLA will be quite different from those in use at other organizations. For example, Apache’s CLAs basically give the ASF a license equivalent to ownership for contributions. The Oracle Contributor Agreement (OCA) used by OpenJDK community gives Oracle joint ownership of contributions. The Eclipse CLA is much more modest. In terms of licenses, all it says is that the contributor agrees that their contributions will be provided under the license(s) for the project they’re contributing to. You can review and discuss the draft CLA on bug 401349.
- Second, we are going to support signed-off-by for contributions which flow to Eclipse project via git and Gerrit. The goal here is to make it as simple as possible for Eclipse projects to accept contributions via the community best practices which have grown up around git. As part of this, we will be developing a contributor certificate of originality, inspired by the one used by the Linux community.
- And finally, we are going to automate as much of this workflow as possible. Our CLAs will be presented and completed on-line. There will be Gerrit support so committers get an immediate indication as to whether a contributor has a CLA on file. There will be git triggers which will reject a commit where there is no CLA on file for the author of the code commit.
There are a ton of details to be worked out, not least of which is the timetable to roll all of this out. Stay tuned for that. If you want to get involved in the conversation, please join in on bug 401236.
Update: fixed typo “we think we think” in the first paragraph.
Life at Eclipse 