Eclipse Dash License Tool March 2021 Update

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Intellectual property management is important for Eclipse projects. As a committer, you are our first line of defense when it comes to identifying and mitigating intellectual property issues.

Over the past year or so, you’ve likely heard and seen rumblings of some of the innovations that we’ve been making in this space. The Eclipse IP Team has been working with individual project teams and the Eclipse Architecture Council to evolve a new set of practices that streamline our intellectual property management practices.

If you’re one of our more seasoned committers, a few things have changed, and your understanding of our intellectual property processes may be a bit stale. The handbook summarizes some of the changes that we’ve made to the Eclipse Foundation’s IP Policy and the practices that support it.

Changes to the IP Policy, coupled with a rather ambitious effort to massage our vast accumulation of intellectual property data has enabled us to create a tool, the Eclipse Dash License Tool, that can help you navigate one of the more challenging parts of the intellectual property process. The primary purpose of the license tool is to help you determine whether or not the third party content referenced by your project requires review by the IP Team.

The tools repository’s README contains instructions for how to use it with various technologies. It does feature a Maven plugin that automatically extracts a dependency list from your build, but was created to be as technology-agnostic as possible, so it can just process a list of dependencies from stdin.

At present, the tool is distributed only via the Git repository and via repo.eclipse.org; sorting out other more convenient means of distribution is something that we’re investigating before making an official first release. In the meantime, the best way to leverage the tool is clone and build it locally. The tool is still evolving in active development, so your comments and questions via GitHub issue, and pull-requests are most welcome.

Related to this work, we are investigating the potential to automatically create requests for IP Team review via the Eclipse Foundation’s GitLab instance [#51,#2] and generate intellectual property logs [#43]. While we explore our options for using GitLab, our IPZilla is still in place and ready to receive your CQs. More on these topics later.