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."

Comments

Re:interesting

[Quarkness]

http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

Open Source is a registered trademark of the Open Source Initiative. You cannot call something open source if it does not meet the requirements of the definition

Re:What about the fees?

[DrLlama]

Full disclosure: I work in the Developer Support group at eBay.

There are two changes that are relevant for you. The first is the creation of the Community Codebase. All projects will be licensed under OSI acceptable licenses. Most of the current contents are under the MIT license. Free as in speech...

The other major change is the removal of all fees from the Individual Tier and the increase in the call limits from 50/day to 10000/month. In other words, you can now register in the Developer Program at the Individual Tier and go live with your application without paying any fees at all. Free as in beer...

Cheers,
Bruce Thompson
Staff DTS Engineer
eBay Inc.

Re:So OSS-Developers should work unpayed for eBay?

[DrLlama]

Full disclosure: I work for eBay in the Developer Support Group.

What the Community Codebase is about is making it easier for new applications to go live that access eBay, not to open the eBay system's code, or to try to create an unpaid labor market for maintaining eBay's code.

There are around 1500 third party applications that use the eBay API suites to create new listings on eBay, etc. A couple of quick examples to get a feel are ChannelAdvisor (channeladvisor.com), SquareTrade (squaretrade.com) and a host of others.

Approximately 20% of all eBay listings are not listed through the eBay website but rather through these third-party applications. The goal of the Community Codebase and the changes to the Individual Tier of the eBay Developers Program is to make it easier to write applications that access eBay.

Hope this helps,
Bruce Thompson
Staff DTS Engineer
eBay Inc.

Re:What about the fees?

[DrLlama]

Hi,

While on the one hand there are no fees or royalties of any kind to join the eBay Developers Program at the individual Tier, it is necessary to join the program in order to be able to call the eBay APIs.

I haven't checked, but I do not believe you need to be registered in the program in order to access the Community Codebase, nor to grab a copy of anything there. It's just that it won't necessarily be all that useful if you are not a member of the program as you will be unable to access our systems without membership.

If that disqualifies the program for being called "OSI acceptable" then I withdraw the claim. I do know that most if not all of the current contents of the repository are licensed under the MIT license.

Cheers,
Bruce.