Re: [technology-pmc] Guidance for acknowledging contribution

[Daryl Maier <maier@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Wayne.  I think we’ll go with attribution comments in the pull request.

My understanding from this passage in the Handbook [1] is that even the co-author fields in the commit record require the author to have a signed ECA, which is why we did not go that route:

"The email address used in the Author field (and, when required, in the Also-by/Co-authored-by entries) must be valid and real, and the contributor must have signed the ECA."

..daryl

[1] https://www.eclipse.org/projects/handbook/#resources-commit

From: Wayne Beaton <wayne.beaton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tuesday, August 25, 2026 at 4:10 PM
To: Technology PMC <technology-pmc@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Daryl Maier <maier@xxxxxxxxxx>; emo-ip-team <emo-ip-team@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [technology-pmc] Guidance for acknowledging contribution

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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> 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