Committers

Committers decide what code goes into the code base, they decide how a project builds, and they ultimately decide what gets delivered to the adopter community. With awesome power, comes awesome responsibility, and so the Open Source Rules of Engagement described by the Eclipse Foundation Development Process puts meritocracy on equal footing with transparency and openness: becoming a committer isn’t necessarily hard, but it does require a demonstration of merit:

• Operate in an open, transparent, and meritocratic manner;
• Write code (and other project content) and push it directly into the project’s source code repository;
• Review contributions (merge and pull requests) from contributors;
• Engage in the Intellectual Property Due Diligence Process;
• Vote in committer and project lead elections;
• Engage in the project planning process; and
• Otherwise represent the interests of the open source project.

For Eclipse projects (and the open source world in general), committers are the ones who hold the keys. Committers are either appointed at the time of project creation or elected by the existing project team.

Inactive Committers

It’s inevitable, but there are times when someone shifts focus, changes jobs, or retires from a particular area of the project (for a period of time). These people may be experts in certain areas of the codebase or representatives persons for certain topics but can no longer devote the time necessary to take on the responsibilities of a Committer role. However, being a Committer within an Eclipse Foundation project comes with an elevated set of permissions. These capabilities should not be used by those that are not familiar with the current state of the EDC project.

From time to time, it is necessary to prune the internal organization and remove inactive folks. A core principle in maintaining a healthy community is encouraging active participation. Those listed as a Committer of the project have a higher activity requirement, as they directly impact the ability of others to contribute. Therefore, members who have been absent from the project for a long period of time and have had no activity will be retired from their role as Committers. in the EDC and will be required to go through the meritocratic process again after re-familiarizing themselves with the current state. Committers, that can no longer devote the time are kindly asked to follow the retirement process of the Eclipse Foundation.

According to the EF rules, before retiring a Committer, the project’s community will be informed of the change and the Committer must be given a chance to defend retaining their status via the project’s dev-list.

To honor the contributions, retired Committers are listed as Historic Committers on the project’s Who’s Involved page. When a Committer returns to being more active in that area, they may be promoted back on the decision of the Committers’ committee. However, after an extended period away from the project with no activity those would need demonstrably have to re-familiarize themselves with the current state before being able to contribute effectively.