As you may be aware, the Eclipse Foundation is currently
transitioning from the Common Public License (CPL) to the Eclipse Public License
(EPL). Please consult the FAQ for an explanation of the reasons for this
change and more detail on what the move will entail (http://www.eclipse.org/legal/main.html).
As part of this process, the Eclipse Board has decided
that current releases of all Eclipse.org projects, as well as any subsequent
maintenance updates, will continue to be licensed under the CPL but will also be
re-licensed under the EPL. In other words, the content distributed by such
development streams will be dual-licensed under both CPL and EPL and recipients
can choose the license they wish to apply. This policy is designed to
offer maximum flexibility to downstream users of Eclipse technology, and ensure
that there is a smooth transition from CPL to EPL licensing. If you
believe this approach is problematic for your project, please contact Executive
Director Mike Milinkovich (mike.milinkovicg@xxxxxxxxxxx) to
obtain an exception from the policy. Every project is important to the
Eclipse community, and the Eclipse management team wants to work with you and
the PMC to ensure that application of Eclipse Foundations policies is sensible,
fair and equitable.
The re-licensing process will require that, for a period
of time, all inbound contributions be submitted under both CPL and EPL.
The web site Terms of Use will be updated to reflect this change, and all
contributors to the current release streams are being contacted to obtain their
permission to re-license their contributions. Once the re-licensing process is
complete (expected to be some time in 2005), all new inbound contributions for
future releases will be licensed solely under the EPL, and the releases
themselves will under EPL only. Previous release streams licensed under
CPL (e.g. Eclipse 2.x) will continue to be governed by the CPL only.
As noted, the Eclipse Foundation must ensure that all
authors of contributions, including both committers and non-committer
contributors, agree to re-license their work under the EPL. For those
individuals whose contribution was made in the regular course of their
employment by an Eclipse Member Organization, their respective employer has or
will give consent on their behalf.
However, individual contributors, including committers
who are working on Eclipse.org projects as individuals (i.e. not in the course
of their regular employment), will need to personally agree to this
re-licensing. This is where the Eclipse Foundation urgently needs your
help. As a subproject lead, you are the principal contact point for the
committers and contributors on your project. We are asking that you forward this
message to all committers on your project, asking them to identify any
non-committer contributors whose contributions they may have committed. We
also need to know whether each committer is acting as an individual or for their
employer, and who that employer is in the latter case. If you could
coordinate a single response, we would be appreciative as this would help
off-load Eclipse Foundation staff. If this is not possible, then please
ask the committers to reply directly to Kathleen Barry (kathleen@xxxxxxxxxxx).
It is very important that our list be complete. If
a committer is unsure as to whether to submit a particular contributor name,
please send it to us anyway along with a short description of the
circumstances. We will work with you to ascertain whether this person
needs to be contacted.
Once we have obtained this information we will be
contacting employers, individual committers and contributors as appropriate to
obtain their agreement to re-license their contributions in the current release
under the EPL.
You should also be mindful of the need to keep careful
record of all contributions on an ongoing basis (including those authored by
yourself and those by non-committer contributors) as detailed in the Due
Diligence Guidelines for Eclipse.org Committers under the heading "Tracking
Contributions". It is important to read this document if you have not
already. It can be found at http://www.eclipse.org/legal/committerguidelines.html.
At some point in the future, we may institute a universally accessible database
to track contributions. To aid in this process, it would be very
helpful if you could indicate whether and how you are collecting and documenting
this information now.
For your convenience we have summarized our
questions:
1. Please provide a current list of committers, their
contact information, noting any case where the committer is contributing as an
individual. At a minimum contact data should include email address and
employer; regular mail address, phone/fax, etc. would be helpful is
available. Eclipse will treat this information carefully and will only
retain it with consent from the individual.
2. Please list the names and contact information of all
non-committer contributors as well as any other pertinent information,
especially which modules they worked on and approximately how much code they
contributed.
3. How are you currently collecting and storing contact
information with regard to non-committer contributors?
4. Is any committer aware of any existing patents
relating to his/her contributions or to contributions he/she has
committed?
Thank you very much for your assistance. The success of
Eclipse has been due largely to the contributions of you and your
colleagues. We want you to know that we value your participation and trust
that we can count on your continued support.
Yours truly,
Mike Milinkovich
Executive
Director,
Eclipse Foundation, Inc.
Office: 613-225-1046
Cell:
613-220-3223
mike.milinkovich@xxxxxxxxxxx
Please direct replies to Kathleen Barry kathleen@xxxxxxxxxxx