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Ask Sam Ramji About the CodePlex Foundation
This week the Codeplex Foundation announced its first project, the ASP.NET Ajax Library Project, as part of its first sponsored gallery, the ASP.NET Gallery. The CodePlex Foundation is now two months old, and Foundation President Sam Ramji has agreed to answer questions about the Foundation, its first project, and overall progress to date. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply.
What do you say to the inevitable flood of "advocates" who claim Microsoft is doing this sort of thing to subvert FOSS?
Bonus points: Do you see Microsoft headed in the same general direction as Google and IBM where the core products and IP are held close to the chest while some of the more peripheral stuff (not key to revenue) is released under open licenses? Recent news like the open sourcing of one of the versions of the .NET framework make it seem that way.
Double bonus points: Do you see Microsoft ever releasing the whole of .NET itself under a non-restrictive license? Do you think there would be some benefit to Microsoft in pulling something akin to Sun GPL'ing Java and still retaining control over its direction? I ask this because it would end a lot of problems (imagined and real) with Mono, for example. But that would imply a lot of work with things like WinForms, ASP.NET and parts of the data client stack, without which any .NET implementation cannot help but be seen as a interesting experiment rather than as a valid enterprise-ready alternative.
To be clear, I would love to see Codeplex lead the way in facilitating a truly cross-platform alternative to .NET on the Windows platform. If that's Mono, great. Perhaps within Microsoft something like this is seen as a threat, but you guys need to get past that mindset. How come I can robustly host PHP or Python apps on Server 2003 today but I can't do the same with .NET in BSD? The Mono team has already done most of the heavy lifting, all you guys need to do is clear up the air around it!
(sorry for the multiple questions, these are things I've been thinking about lately a lot)
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Will priority be given to those using Microsoft tools, or can anyone play?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Why not contribute to SourceForge.net instead of unnecessarly duplicating it?
davecb5620@gmail.com
From your FAQ:
We wanted a foundation that addresses a full spectrum of software projects, and does so with the licensing and intellectual property needs of commercial software companies in mind.
This seems to imply that there are existing foundations that do so without those licensing and IP needs. Regardless, what do you see as the role of a foundation like yours in addressing the needs of commercial software companies?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Unfortunately, the CodePlex Foundation has some sort of distinction between a gallery and a repository. I spoke for 30 minutes with Ramji a few weeks back, and yet I still have absolutely no idea what those differences are. He said that these galleries weren't about code, but rather about the ways corporations contribute code into them.
So, here's the first question: What is the difference between a Gallery and a Repository?
Half the Board of Directors, and half of the Advisory Board are from Microsoft. Why should we think that this anything but a Microsoft front?
The about page says "Our Board of Directors is an interim board" and that they will pick the new board but that's no too encouraging given who's doing the picking. CodePlex seems like Microsoft trying to create a community.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
maybe the appropriate question is, why should this answer bs eo complicated?