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.
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?