The best way to get in touch with me is via email or Twitter. I'd love to help out with your research and preview any work you come up with.

The best way to get in touch with me is via email or Twitter. I'd love to help out with your research and preview any work you come up with.

I am currently working on a research paper on OSS patch contribution process. Your post is really relevant to my research. I am currently reviewing OSS websites specifically on information for new contributor for submitting patches.

I did looked into Linux kernel, X.org, Apache, KDE, OpenOffice.org, and Eclipse. Despite a lot of documents, I fine it hard to find out how one can submit patch to Eclipse by browsing the website. The information about patch contribution on Eclipse is scatter in many pages. I later found many useful information by looking at the committer related documentation but non describe the process for patch contribution. I research goal to describe a generic patch contribution process that can be tailored to various OSS projects. I am thinking about describing it using the Eclipse Process Framework and SPEM.

What would be the best way to get in touch with you?

Best Regards,
Deen

I argue that Eclipse is special in regards to other open source projects for now, but slowly changing as other projects who want to see success commercially need to have these types of agreements in place. The only other project that handles contributions in a somewhat similar fashion is the Apache project. The Apache project has standard contribution agreements that its projects must adhere too, with an option to make things a bit stricter for projects like Apache Harmony.

What would be your ideal approach to handling contributions? Would it help if there was something like Git repositories available to make it easier to contribute from your end and keep up with HEAD?

On a side note, in your case, I think the committer should have used his judgement as your contribution was less than 250 LoC if you didn’t count all the license and refactoring stuff. In the end, the IP process dictates that it’s up to the Eclipse committer to make these decisions. My offer still stands if you want help with the contribution as I don’t mind looking at it.

Of all the Open Source projects I contributed to I had the worst experience with Eclipse due to the IP process. How to do it better? Look at any other Open Source project, it doesn’t matter, Eclipse really isn’t special. For those where it is not OK to check a checkbox you print a PDF, sign it, get it signed by your employer and fax it.

I was writing a simple patch, that makes two anonymous inner classes top level so they can be enabled based on the selection configured in plugin.xml. If you do a wc -l on the file it is over 250 LoC. Sure because all the code is removed in one file, added in two others, there are the Eclipse License headers, whitespace and plugin.xml is not particularly concise either. Now some case of suit is looking at all the closed source code bases in the world and all the software patents so see if that violates somebody’s IP? Really? To me the message that comes across it “Fuck off, we don’t want your patches!”.

Sure if you’re comitter the IP process isn’t so bad but that’s like saying cancer isn’t so bad once you’re cured from it. That doesn’t really help you if you just want to contribute two or three patches for small things.

>The IP process is an asset to eclipse in my opinion.

At this point, I suspect there are a lot of people (contributors, committers and community members) that disagree with you on this opinion.

It’s reasonably clear that it’s considered an asset by some (some commercial members), but I think it’s also becoming clear that it’s not perceived as an asset, but rather a liability by others…like Phillipe…and I don’t think it’s even clear these days how many of even the commercial members agree with this benefit vs. cost trade-off.

Since you are a representative of the committers and community on the Board, I believe it would be worth investing some effort in finding out how widespread Phillipe’s view is among committers and contributors…since their views should matter in terms of representation at the Board level.

The IP process is an asset to Eclipse in my opinion. Eclipse has become the largest and most successful multiple vendor sponsored open source community due to this reason in my humble opinion. We are effective at tracking contributions and validating code is safe for people to consume. There’s a balance of the IP process and making contributions very welcome. In the beginning, there’s a high cost, but once you become a committer your contributions are trusted.

If you have ideas on how to improve the IP process let me know. As an Eclipse Committer representative, I’ve fought hard in trying to make things go faster and make it simpler.