Is the CodePlex Foundation Truly Independent Now?

Glyn Moody writes "Microsoft created its CodePlex, 'an online collaborative software development portal,' four years ago, as the latest in a string of attempts to play nicely with open source. Well, maybe not: Microsoft saw the open source software projects it hosted there as reflecting 'the open community-building spirit of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative.' In September last year, it tried again, launching the CodePlex Foundation, 'a forum in which open source communities and the software development community can come together with the shared goal of increasing participation in open source community projects,' and not to be confused with CodePlex.com, 'a Microsoft owned and staffed forge that encourages the development of open source software based on Microsoft technology.' The only problem is that all the funding for the CodePlex Foundation still comes from Microsoft. But the new Technical Director of the CodePlex Foundation, Stephen Walli, thinks it can become truly independent of Microsoft, open to all companies to create open source software for any platform using only OSI-approved licenses. Will the CodePlex Foundation take its place alongside existing foundations addressing this sector, like Apache and Eclipse, but complementary to them? Or is it forever doomed to be ignored by the open source world because of its origins?"

Comments

Like github, but worse

[kikito]

After a cursory look it seems like an foundation more interested on marketing and policies than in code. I actually had to look hard in order to find the project list.

Am I right to assume that there are only 6 projects?

Seriously, six?

Meh. Call me when they have 600.

(Goes back to github).

It can't work

[amiga3D]

There is too much distrust on both sides. MS has screwed over and back stabbed so many "partners" and viciously attacked Open Source for years. The Open Source community hates them and they know it. There's too much animosity to be bridged by these vague attempts at reaching out to the OSS community. It would take a massive turn around in policy....something like porting Office and Exchange to linux to actually make any real impression.

NDA?

[jc42]

I remember back when the Shared Source Initiative was announced, I looked into in, and found that actually seeing any of the source code required signing an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement). I closed those windows and forgot about it.

So are there NDAs required by any of the various CodePlex things? Or are there other equivalent "agreements" that have other euphemistic names? That would tell us a lot about their actual intentions.

I've written a lot of software that's secret, proprietary, whatever. The companies that hired me paid me pretty well for the software. But if I'm to get involved in something that I think is going to be shared publicly among a crowd of developers, and then discover that it's actually owned and controlled by the web site's owners, I'm going to feel rather double-crossed. I'd rather know beforehand, so I can avoid wasting my time just to donate code to such organizations.

Another variant of this problem existed on AT&T's Sys/V. I did some development in which some of the machines that I tested the code on ran Sys/V. I found that the binaries always contained an AT&T copyright notice. This was obviously because the binaries linked in the AT&T libc and other libraries. So I refused to distribute binaries for Sys/V, on the grounds that doing so might legally constitute signing my copyright to AT&T. I know of a number of companies that abandoned Sys/V after I pointed this out to them (and their lawyers agreed).

There a lot of tricky ways to lose control of your code to big corporations, and Microsoft has a bit of a rep for tricks like this. So it'd be nice to know up front whether a new repository holds such threats.