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Comment by bretpiatt | Hacker News Reader

[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.

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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?

"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?

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