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Wayne,
I do appreciate your honesty in this matter. I sympathize with these users. I am one of them. I have been involved with the BIRT project since it's beta. I have been a steady user of it for over 15 years. I've written 2 books on it. I have helped countless companies implement it. So I completely sympathize with these people, and I share their frustration.
And I can only re-emphasize, we are in the process of getting this going. But we're moving at the speed of bureaucracy. We will have a group ready to re-engage with the community soon. I don't know when that will be, but it will be soon.
-John
On 2020-04-28 12:46, Wayne Beaton wrote:
So let me explain where this is coming from.
I monitor the EMO inbox. Anecdotally, over the many years that I have been monitoring that communication channel, my best guess is that we've received proportionally more questions about Eclipse BIRT than any other Eclipse open source project (this is demonstrably true over the last six months). In the past, I've directed folks to the project's communication channels. But over the last year or so, I've just stopped because the response back tends to be "I tried, but got no response".
On the topic of communication channels... the Eclipse BIRT project must use open and vendor neutral communication channels to connect with the open source community.
Over the past several months, the tone of these emails has gotten progressively darker, nastier, and angrier. In the past week, I've received at least five emails asking if we've completely abandoned BIRT. Here's an excerpt from one of the nicer ones:
It seems BIRT is a dead project at Eclipse. You cannot download it and if you can the version 4.7 which is not compatible with the current version of Eclipse 2020-03. There were millions of us using this project why have you not announced this so we can move to another product?
Frankly, your community is upset. Your window of opportunity is closing.
And, again frankly, I'm having a tougher and tougher time coming up with something to say in response to these emails.
Wayne
Wayne,
Innovent Solutions is prepared to rejoin the fray once we have clear guidance from OpenText that the project is prepared to continue as a viable open source member of the Eclipse community. We continue to see demand for BIRT and would like to return to an active community status. Innovent does not have the resources available to manage this process on our own, and need OpenText as the lead on the project. We have also seen a couple of efforts by community members to open up the process and make it easier for people (outside of OpenText) to participate in the project.
Once we have a clear signal from OpenText that they are committed to an open process, we are ready to move forward.
To John specifically, Wayne identified four things that need to happen in the next three months. Do you think that OpenText can make a commitment to those tasks? My sense is that if we are going to manage a new release, in accordance with the Eclipse process, in the next three months, it is going to take a significant effort.
- Nominate and elect a project lead;
- Update to the EPL-2.0;
- Verify that the project is implementing the Eclipse Foundation's IP Policy; and
- Create a new release, and engage in a release review within the next three months.
Scott Rosenbaum Innovent Solutions, Inc.
Scott
Wayne,
The answer to your question is yes. I've been working with OpenText executives on the engineering, marketing, and sales side to get this project re-going.
The current status is we have marketing agreeing to start monitoring and responding to newsgroups again. That project has not kicked off yet, but it is in it's final stages. So, expect activity in that area soon.
Current commits are happening by our engineering team. However, with Yulin departure, he was the last individual that understood how the entire commit process worked. I will work with ShiHeng to make sure that we are getting these individuals compliant and getting them to sign the ECAs. Now that they have some commits to the project, can we start electing them to be committers? My last committer election got shot down.
In terms of being vendor neutral, as soon as we start engaging with the newsgroups again, we want to encourage others to start contributing to the project again. How we will do this is still outstanding.
In terms of a project lead, I don't know who that will be. Ideally it would be a PM like we had with Paul Clanahan who understands and can navigate the Eclipse ecosystem. I will forward the other things to management and legal for review.
-John
On 2020-04-22 15:53, Wayne Beaton wrote:
I get regular questions in the EMO inbox asking if the Eclipse BIRT project is still viable. The project still has a large community of followers. I'm at a loss for what I should tell them.
So... is the Eclipse BIRT project still viable? Is it still operating as a vendor neutral open and transparent Eclipse Foundation open source project?
AFAICT, there is commit activity happening. But there have been no releases since 2018 and existing releases are no longer compatible with the Eclipse Platform. Further, the project has no project lead and has not yet updated to the EPL-2.0.
It also looks like at least some pull requests are being merged with authors who do not have ECAs on file ( e.g.). Please ensure that all contributors sign the ECA.
AFAICT, the project is not operating in a vendor neutral manner. Please inform me if otherwise.
I very much need to see the following happen:
- Nominate and elect a project lead;
- Update to to the EPL-2.0;
- Verify that the project is implementing the Eclipse Foundation's IP Policy; and
- Create a new release, and engage in a release review within the next three months.
My strong recommendation is that the new release be compatible with the 2020-06 release of the Eclipse Platform.
Wayne
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Wayne Beaton
Director of Open Source Projects | Eclipse Foundation, Inc.
Join us at our virtual event: EclipseCon 2020 - October 20-22
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Scott Rosenbaum
Innovent Solutions, Inc.
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Wayne Beaton
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