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eBay Starts Open-Source Community
Matt wrote to mention a MacWorld story discussing a new initiative by auction site eBay to open source parts of its search functionality, in order to expand their coder resources. From the article: " The software will be available under a new program called Community Codebase, which was announced at the eBay Developers Conference in San Jose, California, on Tuesday. The Community Codebase is free for all members of eBay's Developers Program and PayPal Developer Network. (Pay Pal is owned by eBay.) It allows individual developers and companies to access source code for various eBay and PayPal tools and applications. An example is a Java application that allows TiVo users to search and bid on items via their digital video recorder boxes. Other examples include a Firefox toolbar, various Pay Pal toolkits and an application used to extract information from Pay Pal's database and putting it into Microsoft Corp.'s Excel spreadsheet software."
Ah....when will the Open Source Community learn? We live in a world where money rules, period. Every open source developer out there is doing nothing but feeding the business world with free labor. In a time when development jobs within the US are going offshore and people are being laid off to save a few bucks, it makes me sick to think that these geeks are doing work for free. Open source software, I must say, is quite attractive, as it's freely available, modifiable, and so forth, but when will the developers realize that they are being used. Big corporations making money with free labor....it definitely makes sense for the businesses, but not for the morons who are doing the work.