The important difference here is that we're talking about specification work. The intellectual property flows are fundamentally different for specification development than they are for software development.
Due to these differences in intellectual property flows, we need to have extra legal documentation in place for specification project committers in the form of the Working Group Participation Agreement. By signing that agreement, the committer's employer becomes a participant in the working group and subject to the terms of the agreement (which includes participation fees).
That a person cannot become a committer on a specification project unless their employer joins the working group is an obvious hole in our process that we identified with help from the Jakarta EE Working Group's Specification Committee. We're working on filing this hole. Since this is legal documentation, it takes a little time. We're close to ready to roll this out.
FWIW, Romain's committer status has been suspended, not revoked, while we sort this out. What happened... we created the projects that Romain is a committer on before we had a specification process. When we switched those projects into specification process as defined by the newly created specification process, the fact that we didn't have the necessary paperwork in place to support Romain's involvement with specification work required that we suspend his account while it was sorted out. The EMO Records team has communicated this with Romain.
We've come quite a long way from having no specification process 18 months ago to today. As we identify problems, we address them. The patience, understanding, and participation of the community as we push forward with specification work at the Eclipse Foundation is appreciated.
Wayne