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eBay Starts Open-Source Community

Posted by Zonk on from the sharing-with-the-bidders dept.

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."

3 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Open source eBay? by randomErr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    eBay to open source parts of its search functionality, in order to expand their coder resources.

    Isn't this the same eBay that was suing people who were making auction search sites that linked to eBay items?

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  2. Someone needs to develop Ebay moderation by ChrisF79 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Whenever I do a search on Ebay, I always find ridiculous auctions. Just do a search for a Powermac G5 and you'll see what I mean. There are inevitably those auctions with buy it now of $29 where they claim you'll get a system for free. Of course, I look past those but it would be nice if someone could write a moderation tool that would allow you to filter your results. Perhaps with ebay opening up their systems a bit, a crafty developer could go in and make changes such as this, which would markedly improve the ebay experience.

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  3. Open code to query -their- database by dysk · · Score: 5, Insightful
    They're open-sourcing tools to query their database. This isn't to give back to the open-source community, it's to get developers to write tools that encourage people to spend more money on eBay in a wider variety of contexts.

    There's nothing wrong with them opening their APIs and code to developers, in fact it may prove very useful. Still, it shouldn't be mistaken for a great act of charity on their part.