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Eclipse Foundation Legal Resources

Legal resource page for the Eclipse Foundation.

Getting Started

Agreements and Licenses

Privacy and Trademarks

Committer Agreements

For Eclipse projects (and the open source world in general), committers are the ones who hold the keys. Committers decide what code goes into the code base, they decide how a project builds, and they ultimately decide what gets delivered to the adopter community. Committer status is assigned following a demonstration of merit (generally a record of high-quality contribution to a project) and a successful committer election.

The specific agreements required depends on the nature of the project. For committers on an open source software project (i.e., most Eclipse Foundation projects), the traditional agreements are required. For committers on an open source specification project, additional working group agreements are required.

Committer status is assigned on a project-by-project basis. That is, individuals have committer rights only on those projects for which they hold committer status. For all other projects, they are contributors.

Our committer provisioning process is automated: new committers will—following their successful election—be contacted by email to engage in our agreement workflow (also referred to as our paperwork process), which guides them through signing those agreements that they need. The agreements are provided below for convenience.

  • Member Committer and Contributor Agreement: The Member Committer and Contributor Agreement (MCCA) is used by organizations that are members of the Eclipse Foundation to cover all of their employees who participate in Eclipse Foundation open source projects as committers and contributors. This agreement allows employees of our member organizations to participate in Eclipse Foundation projects without any additional paperwork.
  • Individual Committer Agreement: This agreement is used by committers participating in Eclipse open source projects whose employers are either not members of the Eclipse Foundation or are members that have not signed the Member Committer and Contributor Agreement.
  • Employer Consent Agreement for Eclipse Foundation Specification Projects: The Employer Consent Agreement for Eclipse Foundation Specification Projects (“Employer Consent Agreement”) is to be completed by the employer of a committer who is seeking Individual Committer status on an Eclipse Foundation Specification Project operating under the purview of an Eclipse Foundation Working Group. Note that this form is only required when the employer is not a participant of the corresponding working group.
  • New Eclipse Foundation Committer and Contributor Agreements FAQ In 2018, we updated our standard contributor and committer agreements, and all our committers and contributors, as well as those members who have member committer agreements, were required to re-sign their agreement with us. This FAQ is mostly historical at this point, but does contain some generally useful information.

Resources for Committers

A committer is a person that has been granted commit rights to systems on the Eclipse servers such as Git repositories, web pages, download servers, mailing lists and so forth. In addition to writing project content, committers play a critical role is other aspects of managing an open source project.

  • Eclipse Project Handbook: This Eclipse Project Handbook is a reference guide for working as a committer on an Eclipse open source project.
  • Intellectual Property Due Diligence: At least in some cases, the Eclipse Foundation’s IP Team needs to be engaged to review third-party content, or contributions of project content from non-committers. Committers have an important role to play in this process.
    • Eclipse Committer Due Diligence Guidelines: This document outlines the issues to be aware of and the processes one should follow when working as a committer on Eclipse projects.
    • Project Content: Project Content is content that is managed by the project team. This includes content that is produced by project committers, along with content that is contributed to the project by outside contributors.
    • Third-party Content: The Eclipse Foundation IP Due Dilience Process defines three different types: Prerequisite, Exempt Prerequisite, and Works With Dependency.
    • IP Logs: An IP Log is a record of the intellectual property contributions to a project. This includes such as a list of all committers, past and present, that have worked on the code and (especially) those who have made contributions to the current code base.
  • Legal Documentation: This provides templates for NOTICE, CONTRIBUTING, LICENSE and other files that accompany project source code and distributions.
  • Committer Elections: Contributors may become committers via committer election.

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