Parallel IP Approvals for Incubating Projects
I have some very good news for new projects at Eclipse. At the board meeting last week, an important revision to the Eclipse Intellectual Property Policy was approved. Under the new revision, projects which are in incubation — and which are clearly marking their webpages and downloads as such — can now start to have their IP submissions approved while they are working on the code, rather than waiting for prior approval.
So how does this work? All projects still have to submit contribution questionnaires. The difference is that once a CQ has been reviewed for license compatibility, an incubating project will be authorized via IPzilla to check in the code to CVS and start working on it.
IP due diligence will need to be completed before the project can ship anything labeled as a release candidate or release.
Hopefully this will help us avoid past scenarios where new projects have had to wait for a long time for IP approvals in order to get started!
Life at Eclipse 
Does this policy apply to “sandbox” components for project that are out of incubator, i.e. techology projects such as Mylar?We have been waiting for about 6 months now to get approval for Rome library, which is holding us from implementing RSS support for Mylar.
Eugene
January 22, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Sorry, but no. The project does need to be in incubator status.
Mike Milinkovich
January 22, 2007 at 10:01 pm
I want to make sure I understand the new policy and the terms “release candidate and release”. Once the code is checked into CVS, may an incubating project do weekly and milestone builds that contain the code or does the project have to wait IP due diligence?
Robert
January 25, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Robert,Yes an incubating project can do weekly and milestone builds that contain the code. So an “M3” build would be ok. An “RC1” build would not.Does that help?
Mike Milinkovich
January 25, 2007 at 6:21 pm