The tragedy of Eclipse.org

<i>&#62; 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.</i><p>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: <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.eclipse.org/egit/iplog/v0.7.0.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.eclipse.org/eg...</a>

[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]<p>The structure isn't just to make people's lives difficult. Is it going to be the perfect process for everything? -&#62; probably not. Will it help keep the end user experience and quality high on the project? -&#62; probably so.<p>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: <a href="http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource" rel="nofollow">http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource</a><p>Another example, take a look at where your Linux kernel is coming from: <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10288910-16.html" rel="nofollow">http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10288910-16.html</a> -- More help from IBM.

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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 &#38; 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.<p>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.