Eclipse Contributor Agreement (ECA) FAQ
Last updated March 22, 2022
The Eclipse Contributor Agreement (ECA) is a key document in the process of managing intellectual property contributions to Eclipse projects. This FAQ is intended to help explain what they are, and how they are used.
The purpose of the ECA is to provide a written
record that you have agreed to provide your contributions of code and
documentation under the licenses used by the Eclipse project(s) you're
contributing to. It also makes it clear that you are promising that
what you are contributing to Eclipse is code that you wrote, and you
have the necessary rights to contribute it to our projects. And
finally, it documents a commitment from you that your open source
contributions will be permanently on the public record.
It's basically about documenting the provenance
of all of the intellectual property coming into Eclipse. We want to
have a clear record that you have agreed to the terms under which the
Eclipse community has agreed to accept contributions.
No. The ECA does not include a license or
assignment to the Eclipse Foundation. Unlike many other open source
communities or projects, Eclipse simply wants you to license your
contributions under the open source license(s) used by the project. So
you (or your employer) will continue to own your code.
As part of our open source project
recordkeeping, we want to be able to link every line of code to the
people who contributed them. In the unlikely event of a dispute over
authorship or copyright provenance, Eclipse needs to be able to
demonstrate when the code arrived at Eclipse, how we acquired the
rights to that code, and who wrote it
The ECA is good for three years, after which it
will be expired and you will be asked to complete a new one. However,
if your personal information changes (e.g. your address or your
employer), we ask that you invalidate your current ECA and complete a
new one.
No. Your Committer Agreement is the agreement
that allows you to have write access to the Eclipse Foundation source
code repositories. The ECA is intended for people who are not
committers who wish to make contributions to Eclipse projects.
No. If you are a committer, then you are covered by either a Member Committer
and Contributor Agreement (MCCA) or Individual Committer Agreement (ICA). Both
of these agreements contain the ECA, so by virtue of being covered by one of
those documents, you are automatically covered by the ECA.
Nothing, except you won't be allowed to
contribute to open source projects at Eclipse
We want to make it easier for you to contribute
to Eclipse projects. Previously, we have been asking contributors to
agree to the equivalent of the ECA via Bugzilla or Gerrit on each and
every contribution. Moving to ECAs is intended to streamline that
process, and make it easier for contributions to be accepted by
Eclipse projects.
Log into the Eclipse
projects forge (you will need to create an account with the
Eclipse Foundation if you have not already done so); click on "Eclipse
Contributor Agreement"; and Complete the form. Be sure to use the same
email address when you register for the account that you intend to use
on Git commit records.