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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."
What exactly is the definition of 'open source'. Could you open code to a specific community and still call it open source?
It allows individual developers and companies to access source code for various eBay and PayPal tools and applications.
Or, phrasing it another way, it allows Ebaypal to take advantage of work done for them for free by someone else.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
EBay is a respected player in the business world.
Surely you must be joking. They use an e-commerce structure (Paypal) that acts as a bank, handles millions and millions of dollars like a bank, is structured exactly like a bank, but is *not FDIC-insured* and has the gall to block accounts at random without explanation or recourse.
I don't really know what's respectful about using such a shaky financial tool to do business. I'm surprised they haven't been taken under by some huge class-action lawsuit, or by the feds who should damn well step in and force them to play by the book already.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The Community Codebase is free for all members of eBay's Developers Program and PayPal Developer Network
If you have to be a member of some "developer program" or "developer network", then the code isn't open source. The term "Community Codebase" also suggests that it isn't open source, but that it is a program like Microsoft's "Shared Source" or Sun's "Community Source". Let's hope that eBay didn't mislabel a non-open source license as open source.
Even if the eBay code turns out to be truly open source, it is still closely tied to eBay's service. On balance, it's still better if such code is open sourced, but the decision for eBay to open source a bit of client code is a completely different business decision than, say, IBM or Intel open sourcing a compiler.
Companies like Sun, Microsoft, and (possibly) eBay seem to be trying hard to redefine the term open source for their own marketing purposes. Don't let them get away with it. A company that misapplies the term open source is being deceptive and should be condemned strongly.
(I suppose it isn't surprising that someone like McVoy would go along with this sort of thing; he has, after all, been trying to take advantage of the open source community as well.)