The tragedy of Eclipse.org | Hacker News Reader

The tragedy of Eclipse.org

spearce.org

33 pointsr11t15 comments

> Yup, the iplog is a PDF file holding XML. The foundation is trying to move from an HTML based iplog to an XML based format. So we generated our iplog in XML, using code I wrote in JGit to mine the Git revision history. Someone told the legal team at the Eclipse Foundation that you can’t edit a PDF, so they “freeze” the iplog by putting its contents in PDF. But they don’t have an XSL to format it in human readable text, so we get this instead.

It's even worse than that! The PDF is titled "Microsoft Word - Document29" and has headings duplicating the name of the tag for each type: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.eclipse.org/eg...

[Disclaimer: I do not work for IBM, I do work for Rackspace, I have been in "the corporate world" for over a decade, I have used Eclipse as a developer and I'm currently helping get a project going around cloud deployment through the IDE]

The structure isn't just to make people's lives difficult. Is it going to be the perfect process for everything? -> probably not. Will it help keep the end user experience and quality high on the project? -> probably so.

Working at a place like IBM doesn't mean you want to "do evil" just like working for a small startup doesn't mean you're automagically out to only "do good". Take a real look at the amount of quality stuff IBM contributes to the OSS community: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource

Another example, take a look at where your Linux kernel is coming from: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10288910-16.html -- More help from IBM.

"I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil." http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=crockford...

To be fair, that clause of the JSLint license is idiotic.

I think it's hilarious. Tomayto, tomahto.

"Idiotic" and "hilarious" are not necessarily disjoint. Putting "hilarious" clauses in a software license is not usually a productive policy.

It's what economists call "signaling." It tells people, "there's a human behind this, not just lawyers." (Your inner lawyer is probably preparing to retort, "lawyers are humans, too!" QED.)

Signaling is all well and good, but the license text is a terrible the place to do it.

"there's a human behind this, not just lawyers."

MIT/2-clause BSD isn't exactly pages of boilerplate legalese, either.

No, seriously, it's perfectly sensible. Casual users will just smile at the licence, use the code, and move on. Corporate users will probably throw a fit when they see the licence, and then get their lawyers to negotiate something that suits them better. Crockford can either just say "OK, I license you to use this code for evil" and get a nice story to tell, or charge them money for a different licence. It's a way of getting a little control over "major" uses of the code, while not getting in the way of casual uses. Oh, and did I mention that it's also hilarious?

The OP's complaints seem to be about process that doesn't add anything to the end quality of the product. Compulsory auto-generated change logs within source files? That sure sounds like clueless box-ticking bureaucracy, unless I'm missing something.

A heavy-handed IP process does not necessarily help user experience and product quality. In fact, in the Eclipse community, it can demonstrate the opposite effect.

Because of licensing issues, Eclipse.org won't host the plugins you need to install Subversion support in the IDE. Recent releases of Subversive try to remedy this with a pop-up dialog to download & install the connector plugin when you first try to connect to a repository, but it's a different process, it looks and feels different to the user than normal feature installation, and if it fails for some reason, you'll have to start googling.

The smaller members of the Eclipse community should be able to manage their own IP risk without having to adopt the extremely conservative risk tolerance of IBM, government agencies, very large companies, etc. I think there is definitely a need to support the conservatives, but it shouldn't be at the expense of innovators and early adopters.

How can a community strike this kind of balance?

cached: http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:-Xe_P_DouNYJ:www.spearce...

It's like everything distasteful about the Apache Foundation, but amplified a few orders of magnitude. Not surprising since the same corporate goons (IBM) are at the helm, except that this time around they're the founders and original contributors, not just filling a vacuum capitalizing on an existing project.

Corps will never invest money in a software that they can't use, or worse can get sued millions for IP violation. IP validation is relevant, and it's probably a lot of work for the reviewers too. Software development isn't what it was in the sixties, and looking at the Eclipse worldwide use & acceptance, this process seems to pretty successful.

One of his complaints is that discussions concerning the legal status of contributions takes place in private, rather than on the public mailing lists.

This seems quite reasonable to me. Discuss whether or not some piece of code infringes a patent, say, in a medium that leaves an easily searchable public record, and you are practically begging the patent owner to come ask you to license the patent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com