Greetings PMC.
The Eclipse BIRT project has not participated in the Eclipse Foundation Development Process (or the open source process as we define it) for some time.
The project has not engaged in a release review since June 2018. Their Jenkins instance was recently shut down due to inactivity. Questions on the mailing list and forums are unanswered.
Popular questions about the project are generally of the form "is this project still active?". Eclipse BIRT is the project that I get the most questions about in the EMO inbox, and--unfortunately--the only answer I can give is a shrug and a pointer to connect with the communication channels that I know the project is not monitoring.
Based on a cursory review, the project team has virtually no engagement via Bugzilla. There's a number of unanswered pull requests dating back more than one year. A number of pull requests have been merged within the last year, but based on a cursory review, it appears that only pull requests by colleagues are being merged.
I have reached out to the project via the mailing list and via personal correspondence with project leaders. I've been very clear in these communications that the project team needs to engage in the open source process in general and the EDP in particular, but have not received any indication that the existing project team is prepared to do so.
The project team has engaged recently in the CQ process, and so is clearly not entirely absent from our processes. There is some evidence of ongoing development, but with no formal releases, it's pretty clear that that development is not intended to service the open source community. In one private exchange, a committer stated that (paraphrasing) "From time to time we synch up the open source code with the commercial product". That is, the project team is effectively operating behind their corporation's firewall, making it impossible for others to participate and contribute.
Notwithstanding a few CQs, the project appears to be completely disengaged from the open source process and uninterested in engaging in the EDP.
I have three parties who are interested in taking on responsibility for rehabilitating the project, reinstating builds, and bringing the code up to a modern standard.
I hereby ask that the Eclipse Technology PMC declare the project dysfunctional.
With your declaration, I intend to retire all existing committers and project leads currently working behind their corporate firewall and replace them with new volunteers. My expectation is that the new team will abandon the existing Bugzilla record as many of the bugs are so old that reconciling them against the current code base is not worth the effort.
Can I get your +1, please?
Wayne
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Wayne Beaton
Director of Open Source Projects | Eclipse Foundation
