Rehabilitate the Incubation Phase

Incubation is a powerful tool that we need to better leverage.

Moving a project to the Eclipse Foundation is a process, not an event. There is a period of time during which the team for a newly created project may not fully implement the EDP, correctly apply the IP due diligence process, etc. While a project team is learning our processes and migrating their practices to align with Eclipse Foundation principles and practices, the project is in the incubation phase. This is an indicator to the community and adopters that the project may have some rough corners (e.g., they may be using third-party content that is not compatible with the project licence).

In recent years we have relaxed the incubation branding requirements; my thinking is that we need to reverse this trend and that we should consider other options to ensure that we are correctly informing the community and adopters of the project's state.

A project leaves incubation after they’ve demonstrated that they are implementing good open source practices in general, and the Eclipse Foundation practices in particular via a graduation review.

While in the incubation phase, progress reviews focus on providing feedback to help projects understand where they can improve their practices, and will succeed so long as a project is making progress towards being in good standing.

Projects must want to leave incubation. A project should not be in incubation for an extended period. At present, we have almost two hundred projects that have been in the mature phase for at least two years. This number should be significantly smaller.

Graduating from the incubation phase to the mature phase should be regarded as a significant event.

/cc @mdelgado624