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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."
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?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
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
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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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.
Who, me?
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.
Who, me?
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.)
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.