Can we *fork* a repository of code that is never shipped and contains mixed-content into an Eclipse-Project organization?

Currently we have a quite unfortunate situation:

1. m2e is an eclipse project and covered under EPL 2.0 here https://github.com/eclipse-m2e
2. The main test suite is located here https://github.com/tesla/m2e-core-tests and is not an Eclipse project and code is not consistency managed under EPL or similar
3. Due to the long history it seems quite unlikely that we get clearance from all committers, also the codebase contains a lot of checked in jars with varying licenses
4. Having the tests in a different repo is already uncomfortable, having it in a different organization imposes some confusion and major risk, e.g. even though it seems I'm administrator of the project if all admins retire now one will be able to manage the repo anymore or merge code. Also the whole governance is unclear, e.g. what will happen if some disagreement of committer happens and so on. Also new m2e committers do not gain automatically access to the project.

Question: As we only use this code as a test-suite and never ship this I wonder if we can maybe fork the repository into the m2e organization if we make clear it is not fully covered by the EPL? If one do this the repo will get a little marker like this:

• we make it clear that the new eclipse-m2e/m2e-core-tests is not the origin
• we can even modify the readme to mention the unclear license situation
• we can add a CONTRIBUTION.MD file to explain the same and that we only accept new contributions under EPL 2.0 (e.g. we can record this in the commit message or in header of new files)
• I would then in the new repo try to get approval from some committer tho license their contributions under EPL 2.0 and we can then try to migrate code that is fully covered to the m2e-core repo.

I know this has been discussed before, but things are changing over time and I think especially the approach with having this a forked repo in contrast to import it might be a legitimate way. As the original repo will stay this should allow anyone the freedom to still fork it or contribute to the original repo.

FYI: @akurtakov @hwellmannwr6 @mistria @fbricon

@wbeaton can you probably assist here?