| [eclipse.org-members-committers] Deprecating and Retiring IPZilla |
An update to the IP Policy was approved by the Board of Directors in their June meeting. The new policy took effect at the end of July 2022 and the Eclipse Management Organization (EMO) team is in the process of updating our practices around those changes.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll use this channel to briefly describe the changes and their impact. Much of the work is still in progress, so I’ll also keep you apprised of our progress. We’ve set up Help Desk Issue 1194 as a means of tracking the overall effort and to provide a place for you to ask questions and otherwise get involved with the process. This mailing list goes out to all committers, so out of respect for all of your inboxes, my preference is that we have related discussion on the issue.
First up is the change that I believe has the biggest practical impact on committers: we’re retiring IPZilla. This should be no surprise for those of you who have been following along, but I’m hopeful that you’ll welcome this.
Our timeline is to turn IPZilla off before we leave for our winter break. That is, we intend to turn it off on December 22, 2022. As of September 30, 2022, please consider IPZilla deprecated. I acknowledge that this is a rather short deprecation period, but am hopeful that the solution that we’re offering in place will allay any related concerns.
To take IPZilla’s place, we’ve introduced IPLab, which is a GitLab project on the Eclipse Foundation’s GitLab instance. There are templates that you can use to create review requests on IPLab, but we’re hopeful that you’ll be able to take advantage of the automation that we’ve put in place and instead use the Eclipse Dash License Tool to automatically initiate review requests. IPLab exists today, and the Eclipse Dash License Tool (which has already been adopted by multiple Eclipse open source project teams and even incorporated into automated builds) works. Further, the EMO team has already successfully tested the Eclipse Dash License Tool on many existing Eclipse Project repositories (mostly Eclipse projects that have engaged in a release or progress review in the last year).
Much of the backend processing of review requests is automated as well. While I don’t have statistics on this yet, we’re getting an extremely high hit rate on full automation of the review process, meaning that in a significant number of cases, reviews are completed in minutes. As part of this rollout, we’ve removed the requirement for PMCs to approve intellectual property review requests, which helps speed up the overall process.
We’re still putting pieces in place and some parts of this are still rough, so your patience is requested. We are spending the next month updating and augmenting our documentation, and will soon replace the pre-release version of the Eclipse Dash License Tool with a proper version 1.0 release (in the meantime, use the snapshot).
As I stated earlier, we’re using Help Desk Issue 1194 to track this effort. Please use that issue to pose questions regarding this work.
I’m hosting a call to discuss the changes to the Eclipse IP Policy and Due Diligence Process on September 29, 2022 at 9:00 AM ET. All committers are invited to join in for a very short presentation followed by a question and answer session. Bring your questions and I’ll try to provide answers.
https://eclipse.zoom.us/j/86102590354
Meeting ID: 861 0259 0354
I’ll schedule a second “ask me anything” session in October. More on this to follow.
I also have a session, Revising the Eclipse Foundation's Intellectual Property Due Diligence Process, scheduled at EclipseCon, and will set up a corresponding BoF session (and, of course, I’ll be around during the conference to chat one-on-one).
WayneWayne Beaton
Director of Open Source Projects | Eclipse Foundation
My working day may not be your working day! Please don’t feel obliged to read or reply to this e-mail outside of your normal working hours.