Eclipse Publisher Agreement is not friendly to individual developers

[weakish]

Section 8c:

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless us, Eclipse members, agents, officers, directors and employees as applicable, from and against any costs, losses, damages, liabilities or expenses and attorneys’ fees arising from any and all third-party claims alleging that your Offering ... or arising from any dispute between you and a licensee or End User of your Offering, relating to your Offering.

For example, an individual developer wrote a buggy extension, which causes some End User to lose their file, and this End User is very angry. Also, End User happens to be very rich. End User can hire a lot of very good lawyers to sue the Eclipse Foundation. Thanks to those very good lawyers, the lawsuit may take very long and may cause the Eclipse Foundation to pay a huge amount of money to their officers, agents and attorneys. Then by Section 8c, the extension developer agreed to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the Eclipse Foundation these legal fees, which may cause the extension developer to go bankrupt.

In real life, they may be no such rich angry End User. And if there were one, the Eclipse Foundation would probably covered these costs themselves. However, this cause still makes me unease.

BTW, on https://pkg.go.dev, anyone (they may be the package author or not) can request to add a package, and no one is required to sign any lengthy agreement. openvsx used to work this way, and it worked well. And if signing an publisher agreement is necessary, I'd prefer to sign one friendlier to individual developers.

[spoenemann]

Please create this issue at https://github.com/EclipseFdn/open-vsx.org

[brianking]

@weakish Questions related to the Eclipse Foundation Open VSX Publisher Agreement, licenses, privacy, etc. should be sent to license@eclipse.org. We encourage you to get in touch.