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:This is Good

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.