But nowadays Eclipse is much more than a village. We are a melting pot of different interests. This implies that freeloaders and other suspects joined us. So we loose the accountability, transparency, and much of the fun:-( IMHO Eclipse is going commercial, which means that people are more interesting in earning money than sharing knowledge or coding sophisticated features.

“Divide and conquer” is well know pattern in software architecture and also in civilizations. I suggest that every project inside Eclipse needs a champion (not only a project lead) sticking to all of the upper mentioned principles and being responsible for transparency about his project and the community. Therefore it would be necessary to find “political correct” ways for blaming freeloaders or pseudo-contributors as well as reward excellent citizens.

Every huge organization I know is facing this challenge of having a defined level of principles and ethics and being able to judge those people not sticking to them. So Eclipse reached this points also and needs a way to deal with it.

So I’m tensed, what the future brings.

I think eclipse clearly became a large enough group to loose its ability for all members to act in the common interest.

The wikipedia article you point to is interesting, it also points to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem and indirectly to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons, which somehow supports what I was trying to say in my blog post..

I think there is great value in social science research. And it can help to understand and hopefully solve the problems of the eclipse community.