Re: [technology-pmc] Guidance for acknowledging contribution

[Christoph Läubrich <laeubi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Just out of curiosity I assume the main difficulty here is that the 
author (C) in the git commit is rejected by an ECA check but as git also 
has a committer field that one can fill with a person B's mail with a 
valid ECA.

This would retain authorship, but still the committer claims that this 
is contributed under ECA and it would be safe to override such failing 
check by the virtue of retaining this meta-data right (@Wayne)?

At least it is how we did it in the past when merging git repositories 
while preserving git history, where historical committers might not have 
a valid ECA (anymore).

Am 25.08.26 um 22:10 schrieb Wayne Beaton via technology-pmc:
> I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
>
> FYI, EMO IP Team.
>
> Based on your description, the company owns the IP and their current 
> representatives have the necessary rights to contribute the content 
> under the ECA. Switching out author information in commit records for 
> content the company owns, before contributing it to the open source 
> project is an internal matter.
>
> AFAICT, your questions is entirely about respecting the author. There is 
> no single preferred way to do this.
>
> Some projects credit specific authors in file comments (this is not a 
> requirement). They might also consider honoring the original author by 
> including them in an "Also-by" footer in commit comments. These options 
> are likely the most enduring.
>
> Comments in an issue or PR are also fine.
>
> HTH,
>
> Wayne
>
> On Tue, 25 Aug 2026 at 15:38, Daryl Maier via technology-pmc 
> <technology-pmc@xxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:technology-pmc@xxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
>
>     Hi,
>
>     I’m wondering if the PMC has any guidance on documenting the
>     following situation:
>
>     A former contributor “C" created a large amount of uncontributed
>     code while working for a company “Y”.  C no longer works for Y and
>     he no longer has a valid signed ECA.  Y owns the rights to his code
>     produced while working there and his colleagues at Y are now trying
>     to contribute the changes to the Eclipse OpenJ9 project. Their plan
>     is to remove C’s signed authorship from the commits and then submit
>     them via one of their employees with a valid ECA and knowledge of
>     the code, but they still want to acknowledge C’s original authorship
>     somehow.
>
>     Does Eclipse have a preferred way of documenting this? I think
>     simply acknowledging the original contributor in a comment in the PR
>     should be sufficient, but we want to check if there are other
>     preferred ways of doing so.
>
>     Thanks,
>     ..daryl
>
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> --
>
> Wayne Beaton (he/him)
>
> Head of Open Source Projects | Eclipse Foundation
>
>
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