The topic of project websites, and their presence on the same domain as Eclipse Foundation-managed tools and websites has generated a great deal of discussion and we appreciate your thoughtful feedback. Specifically, as a synopsis,
), for the shared infrastructure provided by the Foundation (e.g., newsgroups, Jenkins, GitLab, etc.), and for the Foundation’s main website. Due largely to security and architectural requirements, the time has come where the project websites need to be separated from the Foundation-managed elements of the site.
In particular, the discussion has raised a number of philosophical questions and earnest debate.
One of the key philosophical points raised was that there is a divergence of opinion on who are the true owners of the
eclipse.org website. One interpretation is that it is the website that is owned and operated by the Eclipse Foundation on behalf of its community. Another is that it is the website of the Eclipse project and the projects that have come after it, and the interests and needs of the projects are paramount.
In the end, both of these positions are completely legitimate, but not tenable in today’s security conscious world. There are material risks to the Foundation and the community that must be addressed, and status quo is not an option. That puts us in a position where we must find a solution which minimizes, to the extent possible, cost and disruption. “Minimize” is the key word there – there are no zero-cost options.
In retrospect, perhaps moving all of the Eclipse Foundation services to a separate domain might have been done many years ago. In our defense, even before the Eclipse Foundation came into existence in 2004, general services like Bugzilla, mailing lists, and newsgroups were already set up and operational. This meant at the time adding forums, the wiki, Gerrit, Jenkins, GitLab and others to the
eclipse.org domain seemed sensible.
This has resulted in our current state where a significant collection of services that are, for better or worse, tied tightly to
eclipse.org website, and the simple fact of the matter is that moving all of the foundation’s services off of
eclipse.org to a new domain is neither affordable nor practical in terms of disruption to the community. In addition, though we appreciate that on an individual project level the effort and cost of moving a project’s domain is real, moving services like our mailing lists,
ci.eclipse.org, and
gitlab.eclipse.org would also be very disruptive and painful to those very same projects. Finally, it is also important to state that although services like wiki, Gerrit, and Bugzilla are in the process of being deprecated, they are not going to be retired or read-only for at least 18 months and probably longer.
Based on the analysis done and discussions with various stakeholders, the decision has been taken to move the project websites to
eclipse.dev/. In the end, the conclusion drawn was that moving the project sites is the far more viable solution, and in most (though not admittedly not all) cases, no more disruptive overall to the project's committers and community than moving the Foundation’s infrastructure to a new site. We do recognize that the costs of moving project sites to
eclipse.dev/ are real, and in particular the SEO costs to the projects are not negligible. Our view is that there is no realistic alternative to having two sites, so that cost is inevitable. We will put in permanent redirects for all projects to help mitigate SEO challenges, and will provide best practices for the projects on steps they may take to help with SEO results. Again, we recognize this is not perfect, but it is the best approach to improve the overall security of the Eclipse Foundations’s services, and our project’s websites.
ACTION PLAN:
Eclipse project websites are going to move to
eclipse.dev. Specifically, this entails:
All project websites of form
eclipse.org/projectname will be moved to
https://eclipse.dev/projectnameA permanent, indefinite redirect from
eclipse.org/projectname will be created. This will ensure that
eclipse.org/projectname/somepage will still work.
The timeframe to implement this is approximately 60 days(see:
https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipsefdn/helpdesk/-/issues/3069 ).
Project websites that have not been updated since January 2021 will be asked to update their sites no later than 90 days after being informed of the required update. Should they not be able to enact an update, or otherwise choose not to update, we will remove the site and instead have
eclipse.org/projectname and
eclipse.dev/projectname redirect to the PMI page for the project.
In the future, project websites will be required to periodically update. The specific period will be decided by the Eclipse security team, though it is hoped this won’t be frequent to avoid disruption. Project teams will be given a minimum of 90 days of advance warning of the requirement to update.
