I'm neither for or against this. I do agree the communication was late. It probably would have been better to not tell us at all :).
I do see the need for recognizing individual installs though. Tracking IP address as we've done to date hides a lot of data behind corporate firewalls that present a single address for all their employees.
I think it's critical we know how many individual users are using Eclipse. Is Eclipse usage really on the decline? Are all those downloads legitimate users or are they bots? I see a lot of statements made from the Eclipse community assuming one way or the other. I would be great to be able to call them out with real numbers.
Doug.
