Could this be a case of an over zealous new management person who’s at worst ignored his/her devs’ inputs.

So what does this mean to me as an eclipse developer ?

This change in the licence terms mean that in case I build plugins on top of Aptana, then I need to ask for a licence from Aptana because “The new license just gives us[Aptana] more visibility into who is redistributing the IDE. We[Aptana] want to keep a very high level of quality, therefore we[Aptana] want to be aware of any redistribution of the IDE, and we[Aptana] ask that if you are going to redistribute, you contact us for a license (free or otherwise).”

The license faq makes for an interesting read.

So what are the implications of this going forward?

It may mean that the next time I contribute something back to any open source project, I may need to look up as to what may become of my contribution. I contributed my work under EPL, but since the copyright belongs to the company maintaining the project, the company may just decide to change the license terms altogether.

I may also want to investigate who makes such decisions in the company. Is it an aliance of contributors from various companies (like OSGi); is it a foundation like Apache, or Eclipse, or Gentoo that has representatives from a lot of other companies which may put their foot down on such issues ?