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Updated Web Site Terms of Use

Community Bulletin

November 12, 2008

Effective today, the Eclipse Foundation has made a number of changes to the Eclipse.org web site terms of use. This document describes the conditions under which people use the eclipse.org web site, including contributions to the Eclipse community via bugzilla, mailing lists and newsgroups.

There are two main reasons for the changes:

  1. The updated terms of use establishes a framework for licensing non-code contributions, like articles, wikis, blogs, etc, under a license other than the EPL. The previous terms of use was not clear on non-code contributions. Right now, we have not defined the additional licenses, but in the future the updated terms of use will provide the flexibility to license non-code contributions under different licenses, e.g. a Creative Commons license. We hope to get the required Eclipse Board of Directors approvals in place soon.


  2. In September 2008, the Eclipse IP Policy was changed to introduce the concept of a Project License(s). This was primarily done to allow for the scenario where an Eclipse project may be dual licensed. For example, the Eclipse Link project needed to be available under a BSD license so it could be used as the reference implementation for JPA 2.0. The web site terms of use document has been updated to reflect that contributions to a project would be done under the Project License(s), not just the EPL.
    We do not anticipate that many projects will become dual licensed. The decision to allow a project to be dual license is done on a case-by-case basis and requires the unanimous approval of the Eclipse Board of Directors.

The updated terms of use have been approved by the IP Advisory Committee of the Eclipse Board of Directors and will become effective November 12, 2008. Any questions or comments should be directed to license@eclipse.org.

Reference: Previous Terms of Use


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