Is the CodePlex Foundation Truly Independent Now? 123
Glyn Moody writes "Microsoft created its CodePlex, 'an online collaborative software development portal,' four years ago, as the latest in a string of attempts to play nicely with open source. Well, maybe not: Microsoft saw the open source software projects it hosted there as reflecting 'the open community-building spirit of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative.' In September last year, it tried again, launching the CodePlex Foundation, 'a forum in which open source communities and the software development community can come together with the shared goal of increasing participation in open source community projects,' and not to be confused with CodePlex.com, 'a Microsoft owned and staffed forge that encourages the development of open source software based on Microsoft technology.' The only problem is that all the funding for the CodePlex Foundation still comes from Microsoft. But the new Technical Director of the CodePlex Foundation, Stephen Walli, thinks it can become truly independent of Microsoft, open to all companies to create open source software for any platform using only OSI-approved licenses. Will the CodePlex Foundation take its place alongside existing foundations addressing this sector, like Apache and Eclipse, but complementary to them? Or is it forever doomed to be ignored by the open source world because of its origins?"
No it isn't. Now let's get back to work. (Score:1, Interesting)
Codeplex was created to undermine the open source and more particularly the free software movement. Well, they launched their Tet offensive and it was massively funded, but it failed.
They'll have to try something else.
Like github, but worse (Score:2, Interesting)
After a cursory look it seems like an foundation more interested on marketing and policies than in code. I actually had to look hard in order to find the project list.
Am I right to assume that there are only 6 projects?
Seriously, six?
Meh. Call me when they have 600.
(Goes back to github).
Re:Let me get this straight (Score:1, Interesting)
Linux = Opensource, Opensource != Linux
Now that we got that out of the way... He means that .Net is just not very suitable for open source en cross platform development. In Java, I can use swing, hibernate and other stuff and just assume it will work on other platforms. Usually this doesn't cause any issues if your application is coded decently. However in C# en .NET a lot of useful and sometimes essential functionality is only available in Windows.* namespaces and libraries. These are not available in other implementations. This makes it very hard to build stuff in .NET that also works on Mac and *gasp* Linux. Personally I am also of the opinion that both offline and online C# and .NET documentation is bloated, filled with walls-of-text, with class documentation spread over multiple pages, and generally a pain in the ass, but others may disagree with me.
I think the popularity of C# is in a lot of ways related to it being the 'new thing' and XAML and WPF are nice buzzwords for those who don't have to work with those monstrosities. C# is in some ways easier to grasp than Java but horribly inadequate in other ways.
It can't work (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Shouldn't this be in Ask Slashdot? (Score:2, Interesting)
Leading question, rhetorical question, whatever, the fact is that everyone knows what Codeplex really is, so at the end of the day, only Microsoft shills seem particularly interesting in pushing it, or using it. The open source community really has no need for yet another trojan horse from Redmond.
NDA? (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember back when the Shared Source Initiative was announced, I looked into in, and found that actually seeing any of the source code required signing an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement). I closed those windows and forgot about it.
So are there NDAs required by any of the various CodePlex things? Or are there other equivalent "agreements" that have other euphemistic names? That would tell us a lot about their actual intentions.
I've written a lot of software that's secret, proprietary, whatever. The companies that hired me paid me pretty well for the software. But if I'm to get involved in something that I think is going to be shared publicly among a crowd of developers, and then discover that it's actually owned and controlled by the web site's owners, I'm going to feel rather double-crossed. I'd rather know beforehand, so I can avoid wasting my time just to donate code to such organizations.
Another variant of this problem existed on AT&T's Sys/V. I did some development in which some of the machines that I tested the code on ran Sys/V. I found that the binaries always contained an AT&T copyright notice. This was obviously because the binaries linked in the AT&T libc and other libraries. So I refused to distribute binaries for Sys/V, on the grounds that doing so might legally constitute signing my copyright to AT&T. I know of a number of companies that abandoned Sys/V after I pointed this out to them (and their lawyers agreed).
There a lot of tricky ways to lose control of your code to big corporations, and Microsoft has a bit of a rep for tricks like this. So it'd be nice to know up front whether a new repository holds such threats.