Re: [science-pmc] Thoughts on projects switching between type A and type

[Mike Milinkovich <mike.milinkovich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Please allow me to add the perspective of the Eclipse Foundation on this topic.

What Greg says below is mostly true. It was definitely true when the Eclipse Foundation started 14 years ago. But what was once novel and risky is now commonplace. Open source is now generally accepted throughout the software industry. Many companies do not do the equivalent of Type B due diligence themselves. The Eclipse Foundation is the only open source foundation that even offers this level of intellectual property management. For example, neither the Apache Software Foundation or the Linux Foundation perform the equivalent of Type B for their projects. Type A is actually considered the norm for what's provided by a foundation. Type A is also significantly better than what you get from most GitHub-based projects.

Type A due diligence allows projects to move faster, and in particular get started faster. For many projects it is entirely sufficient. My suggestion is: listen to your adopters. If you are getting backpressure from your adopters to move to Type B, consider it. But frankly I don't think Type B is worth it unless you have a concrete reason to use it. One clear example of where it is required in our experience is if your project is being adopted by industrials (e.g. automotive), as their risk profile lags the software industry's by a decade or so.

Related: I would like to draw your attention to the recently announced ClearlyDefined project which the Eclipse Foundation is part of. We are pretty excited about the idea of sharing this provenance information to save everyone in the industry from individually repeating the entire due diligence process for every open source library.

HTH

On 2018-03-13 7:44 PM, Greg Watson wrote:

Anyone wanting to redistribute and/or sell products that include Eclipse code would require the additional due diligence provided by B. Otherwise they could be potentially liable for infringing IP or copyright. So if there is any desire to have the software used in this way (e.g. you wanted a vendor to use it in a product, or you thought it might be worthy of commercialization) then B would be the best choice. If you don't think this is likely then A is probably fine.

Regards,

Greg 

On Mar 13, 2018, at 6:31 PM, Jay Jay Billings <jayjaybillings@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Thanks for the thoughts Christopher. I see it much the same way coming from the Lab and our corporate partners don't care about this issue very much. 

I am asking for opinions on this to evaluate the possibility and value of making the next version of ICE type A under EPL 2.

Jay

On Mar 13, 2018 18:02, "Christopher Brooks" <cxh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Type B is "better" than A, but B can be difficult if the tree is large and there are many contributors.

I see the main value of Type B in being that corporations might be more inclined to use Type B software than Type A software in their product.

However, the effort to meet Type B compliance can be large and could take away from other efforts.

For me, working in academia, Type A is sufficient.

_Christopher

On 3/13/18 11:08 AM, Jay Jay Billings wrote:

Everyone,

Do you have any thoughts on projects switching between type A and type B IP due diligence? In type A, licenses are checked for compatibility. Type B is the classic IP policy that includes the full provenance check in addition to the license check of type A.

Jay

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Jay Jay Billings

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Twitter Handle: @jayjaybillings