Greetings BIRT Project team and community.
The EMO and Eclipse Technology PMC have reviewed the state of the Eclipse BIRT project and have determined the project is dysfunctional. Specifically, the project has not been operating in accordance with the Eclipse Foundation Development Process (the open source rules of engagement in particular) for some time, and there does not seem to be any evidence that this will change. Unfortunately, the current practices of the project team actually make it very difficult/impossible for even other committers on the project to contribute.
The EDP affords us certain allowances in this case. In particular, the project leadership chain has the ability to add and remove committers and project leads.
To that end, we are rebooting the project.
We will retire most of the committers. Note that nobody is being banned from the project: retired committers can regain their status by following the usual process of making contributions to the project demonstrating knowledge of the code base and open source development practices, followed by a committer election.
Some existing committers will retain their status and some new committers will be added. I have spoken privately with many of them and they are prepared to bring the project back in line with open source development practices, modernize the build, resolve outstanding security issues, and otherwise make the project a welcoming place for contribution and community participation.
My strong recommendation to the rebooted project team is that they discard the current bug backlog. Specifically, my strong recommendation is that they ask the Eclipse Webmaster to close all existing open bug reports against the project in the Eclipse Bugzilla instance and remove the BIRT product. Moving forward I recommend that the project team use GitHub issues (I further recommend that they aggressively prune open GitHub issues as well). The backlog is very large and my feeling is that any attempt to consolidate it against the current state of the project will require more effort than value.
Evidence seems to suggest that there is a very active community interested in the project. Should the project team opt to take my recommendation, I am confident that the community will re-engage as they see progress being made and ensure that the project team is aware of contemporary issues by either reopening closed issues or creating new ones.
Wayne
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Wayne Beaton
Director of Open Source Projects | Eclipse Foundation
