EclipseGeneralFAQ

How can I contribute?

One of the priorities that we have for the eclipse project is to encourage the active participation of developers like yourself. The mechanics of how you can provide bug fixes is pretty easy: create a CVS patch and either attach it to the bugzilla defect or email your patch to the appropriate developer's mailing list. Doing a search in bugzilla for defects with the "helpwanted" keyword will identify problems that the existing committers feel are important but do not have the time to work on. You will also find good defects to work on by sorting the open defects by their importance. If you decide you want to tackle one of these defects be sure you let us know (by annotating the defect or, if there is no response, sending a message to the appropriate mailing list) otherwise you may be duplicating the efforts of others. Fixing a critical defect is a great way to impress existing committers.

Developers who give frequent and valuable contributions to a component can have their status promoted to that of a committer. This is described in the Eclipse Project Charter. We want more committers so if you are interested you should start by subscribing to one or more of the developer's mailing lists. If you have suggestions on how we can make it easier for you to become a developer on the eclipse project we are very interested in hearing from you.

The Eclipse Project PMC

Can I ship Eclipse or parts of it with my commercial software?

If you have a legal question, ask a lawyer. With absolutely no warranty of any kind, here is a brief discussion. The short answer seems to be yes. Eclipse licensing is described here. IBM lawyers are rumored to be working on a Common Public License (CPL) FAQ. In the absence of that, four points seem clear. First, if you intend to ship your code as open source licensed with the CPL, you have no problems. You can do practically anything with the Eclipse code except remove the copyright notices or the CPL. Second, section 2 of the CPL boils down to: If you modify Eclipse code, your modified version must be made available as open source licensed with the CPL. Third, plugins that are separately packaged and contain no modified Eclipse code are exempt from this requirement. Such plugins are not required to be open source. Fourth, independent of this open source discussion, you can charge whatever you want.

What about non-plugin apps built on Eclipse or parts of it?

With the same caveats as above and subject to the same restrictions, those seem ok, too. Several companies are or are planning to ship commercial software based on Eclipse that will not be open source. Some of these companies are eclipse.org board members. What is true for one company should be true for all. Also, what is true for all of Eclipse should true for any part of it - the license makes no distinction - so the same logic should apply to applications that use SWT, JFace, GEF or other attractive parts of Eclipse. Moreover, these companies do not require you to separately download Eclipse, so apparently they believe that mere aggregation of, say, unmodified Eclipse JAR files with commercial application code does not make the result a "derived work" in license terms.

Last Modified 6/21/06 10:39 AM

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