No, the information they wanted was actually surprisingly reasonable - how many requests per day was my application going to make, how many concurrent connections, how many people would be using my app, what kind of information did I need, what did I need it for, who could they contact if my application turned out to be - intentionally or by accident - DOS'ing the LDAP server(s), and so forth.

I just found it kind of funny that I should fill out a six-page form to get information I could technically access already, anonymously. (Also, it was the first time I saw such a form, that might have been a bit of a culture shock for me.)

Granting anonymous access would be a matter of organization precedent, but I can imagine a world where it's encouraged to dev against these services and notify upstream service owners when stuff is about to change reasonably ahead of time (too soon and too many chefs might come, unfortunate reality).

I think every service owner should know who their 'customers' are, it's important because of things like Pager Duty rotations for example. Remember that scene from Hackers, "God wouldn't be on this late?"... in a sense, the 6 page form might seem like overkill but it beats sifting through a conversational email thread asking for all the same pieces of information. They could gamify the form I suppose, if that's better than a paper form... but on their end there should be a spreadsheet used for op budgeting etc and they need the info.

I see - at my work I'm currently encountering change requests and they are about the same thing. Papers/requests explaining in baby steps what is going on so it can be replicated.

It's my first time coming across them - I suppose it's a good idea, but slightly overkill since I write documentation for my code and it's in source control as well.