gistfile1.txt

Dear Committer:

The Eclipse Board of Directors approved changes to the Eclipse Intellectual
Property Policy on October 21, 2019.  The most significant change relates to
how we will perform due diligence of leveraged Third Party Content (Section IV
B).

Motivation and Background:

The Eclipse IP Policy and Procedures date back to 2004.  While we have made
significant changes over time, we cannot support agile development nor
continuous delivery.  Further, it's impossible to scale to modern day
technology such as Node.JS, Electron, NPM, etc.  Additionally, our process for
third party content is burdensome and lacks automation.

License Compliance of Third Party Content:

The change removes the requirement to perform deep copyright, provenance and
scanning of anomalies for Third Party Content unless it is being modified
and/or if there are “special” considerations regarding the package. Instead,
the focus for this content will be on license compliance only, which many of
you know today as Type A.

Reminder, please note that this will not impact how we handle project code
and/or modified third party code.  Full due diligence review will remain in
place for this content.  This change applies to THIRD PARTY Content only.

Futures:

We are currently working on tooling to provide to Eclipse projects so that in
the near future, Eclipse projects will perform these license compliance checks
allowing projects to only check in with the IP Team to file a CQ when/if the
project encounters IP violations or restrictions with respect to its Third
Party Content.  We estimate this tooling will be available by the end of the
year.  

In the meantime, this CQ is being changed to Type A (License Compliance Only)
as part of our effort to implement the updated IP Policy. We ask for your
patience while we use existing infrastructure to roll out these changes with
further automation being planned.  We will need to change documentation, front
end changes, etc.  More information will be forthcoming on this topic.

These efforts are in support of our community and we will work with you as we
continue to move forward with this new modernization effort.

Should you have any questions or comments, please email
emo-ip-team@eclipse.org.

Best Regards,

S. Corbett
Manager, Intellectual Property