In one of the most spectacular shot-in-the-foot own goals since Project Zero Chance Of Success , the licensing on the Aptana IDE has been changed to the Aptana Public License (APL). In short, you can look at the code, you can even fix their bugs, but you can't distribute the changes. In other words, it's not an open-source license , and therefore, open-source coders need no longer apply.

Why is no-one surprised that this caused backlash in the community ? It seems pretty clear that if you develop something and then close the source off later, you're going to alienate those people that helped to get you to that position in the first place.

Eclipse is a commercial ecosystem, and there's benefits to both the common open-source layer and the proprietary extensions that sit on top of them. After all, Eclipse wouldn't exist without the investment of the commercial memberships that fund the Eclipse foundation, or the payroll of those commiters on projects. But it's either one of two levels; a commercial pay-for system with support contracts, or an open-source model where developers are interested in participating and contributing towards the codebase.

Where things start to go wrong is when you've got something trying to blur the lines. It didn't work for ProjectZero (which is also the number of external commiters on that project), and it's not going to do Aptana any favours either.

Don't get me wrong; there are commercial companies (e.g. Codehaus) whose marketing arm involves doling out free licenses to open-source projects as a way of hooking them early. That's not a bad marketing tactic (and in fact, one of the side effects of the fact that universities can teach with Eclipse means that by the time they get employment outside an academic setting, they're pretty much used to the way Eclipse works). But at least IBM doesn't pretend that the RAD toolset is 'source-open' or 'source freely available' -- it's a commercial offering, not a codebase that you can read but you can't use.

This isn't going to work out well for Aptana. Either they should have just junked all the open-source mantra and gone commercial, or it should have been kept open source. Now, they've got an IDE that no-one wants to contribute to (even if they can see the source) and a strong desire for other tools (like the DLTK based Ruby IDE ) to take its place.

And all this (according to the aptana blog ) is to see who's using Aptana:

The new license gives us more visibility into who is redistributing the IDE. We strive to keep a very high level of quality and polish, therefore we want to be aware of any rebranding and redistribution of the IDE. We encourage you to write and distribute your own plugins for the IDE, take the source code and improve it, and if you?d like to become a contributor, we?d be happy to have your help.

I'll give you a clue. The number dropped to the name of the last project that tried this.

Alex.