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[News.eclipse.foundation] Re: Overtaker of Eclipse Foundation Inc. possible? 
ilias wrote:

On Thu, 11 Nov 2004 10:55:55 +0100, Joerg von Frantzius <joerg.von.frantzius@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Alright, something like that is what I hoped (and somehow expected from
my subjective impressions), but it is good to have it stated here in
clear terms.

Bad news:
The Eclipse Foundation can apply at _any_ time a different license to the source-code base, which requires license fees.
The code so far remains available under the open-source license.
This would require an unanimous vote by the board (which is not very realistic).

So what? Why is that bad news? There is no such thing as absolute security in the mathematical sense of absoluteness. There will always be a probability of potential imaginable problems, but if any such problem is as likely to happen as all members of the board of directors being kidnapped by aliens, then that's OK with me. And I wonder why that's not OK with you, at least it seems so.

But!
A more realistic scenario:
As IBM has a very large amounts of developers within eclipse, it controls a "critical-mass" of the eclipse domain-knowledge. Thus IBM can effectively 'shutdown' the Eclipse Foundation by only moving out it's developers.

The existing source code would still remain in the hands of the Eclipse Foundation, and would be continued like any other open source project, only without the massive financial backing from IBM. It would still have a comparably *good* backing from companies such as SAP, Red Hat, HP and I don't know who else. You can't really blame IBM for their investment, just because they could discontinue it in the future.

So, realistically, nothing is secure with the eclipse platform (as with nearly every open source system). 

Yes. That's life. Nothing really is absolutely secure ;-)