Traffic there is like nothing I've ever seen before in my life. Lane markers... they're just suggestions. Speed limits? What's that? Traffic lights, well, maybe, if there's a cop handy.
What's amazing to me is how the congestion isn't as bad as it could be, because traffic in Bangalore, and well India as a whole, is compressible. When a traffic light turns red, cars and auto-rickshaws and especially motorbikes, move in to fill the space as tightly as they can. Then when the light changes, everyone moves out and traffic flows. What that means is that while North American traffic behaves a lot like a liquid, my observation in Bangalore was that traffic behaved much more like a gas.
There was a desktop OS called Domain/OS from Apollo Systems. Rumour had it that Apollo was founded by Multicians who fled from Honneywell. It was a great OS on a lot of levels, not least you had native Domain/OS, BSD4.3 and System5 UNIX, an amazing shared filesystem, and networking that was literally plug and play.
Then of course HP bought it and killed it in favor of HP/UX, sigh.
While we don't do nearly as much direct legistlating in Canada, and while we don't elect nearly as many officials, the solution is indeed what you suggest: a separate piece of paper for each race.
The closest Canada gets to an American election in terms of numbers of races is a municipal election: Two school boards (you vote one of the two), one city council and one mayor. Each is on a separate ballot and each goes into a separate ballot box. When the poll closes the abllots for one race are dumped out onto a table, opened up, sorted into piles based on the marks and counted twice. I've witnessed this as a scrutineer representing a candidate during one election. For a typical polling place serving four poll districts the process took less than an hour for each race. The numbers are called in to the Returning Office and the ballots are sealed back into the ballot boxes to be returned to the Returning Office. Barring any dispute the elecetion is certified the next day.
The real issue is that it takes people. Each polling place needs a Deputy Returning Officer and two poll workers for each poll district, more likely two shifts of DROs and poll workers. The US does not appear to be willing to hire enough people do manage this. It's not at all a question of population size or number of issues on the ballot or anything else like that it's a matter of people.
And politics.
Elections Canada officials are professional civil servants. They do not and may not act on behalf of any candidate in any way except one: they vote for the candidate they prefer. The fundamental reason that US elections are so badly broken really has nothing to do with the ballots, the technology or even the number of people employed to execute the election: It's that the officials overseeing the process are partisans.
Ken Blackwell of Ohio is charged with overseeing his own election race to governor, and for certifying the results. What insanity is that? Talk about the definition of conflict of interest! Even if he were pure as the driven snow the appearance of impropriety would be difficult to avoid. Let's face it, given the reports out of Ohio from the 2004 election and the reports coming out of there now, he's anything but pure as the driven snow.
Read Dennis Ritchie's Turing Award speech. He describes a technique that can put a back-door into login with nothing in the source. It requires the compiler's cooperation (actually, it's the compiler doing all the work) so if you can provide your own compiler then you're fine.
Or are you?
How do you know that your compiler hasn't been compromised?
Frankly, I still believe that a piece of paper with a circle you put an X in is the way to go. Canada and the UK have been doing it that way for ever and they know the full results of the election that night. Other than the requirement for enough poll workers to actually do the count, what prevents the US from adopting this?
I'm asking seriously because it doesn't make sense to me (as a Canadian living in the states) that the electorate would allow something as fundamental as their vote to be compromised like this!
The last time I voted, I know my vote was counted. Can anyone in the US be as certain?
Physically, you're abvsolutely correct. The difference is that the price differential is a tax that the RIAA collects to offset the artists' "losses" due to copying.
So, by purchasing an Audio CD-R you are paying for the right to make a copy of a friend's CD as permitted under the AHRA.
Thanks to the AHRA (Audio Home Recording Act), making a copy of a friend's CD is indeed legal!
The reason that "Music" CD-R is more expensive than "Data" CD-R? License fees paid to the RIAA to cover the copies made in this way. The artists are supposed to get compensated from those fees, but like so much where the RIAA is involved, the artists are being left out in the cold.
Let's insist that the facts be reported rather than the RIAA and MPAA's propaganda, shall we?
This is one of the reasons I refuse to make use of the self-checkout aisles, and further refuse to do business with stores that are overloading the self-checkout.
The last time I went into my local Home Depot I had a similar experience, with a sligth twist. I had a handful of items and might have made effective use of self-checkout. The line for the self-checkout was over a dozen people long, as was the line at the one open cashier. When this sort of occurence happens I loudly comment that Lowe's seems to be much more concerned about customers and leave the store to make my purchase elsewhere.
On occasion I have taken the time to let the store manager know that I find the situation unacceptable and that his store is losing business as a result. In a WalMart world, this probably won't make a lot of difference, but I refuse to waste my time because the store couldn't be bothered to have sufficient staffing.
Wow, that's got to be the clearest example of toeing the Bush Crony Talking Points I've seen today.
Let's put this chestnut to bed here and now: These so-called IOU's are US Federal Bonds. The single most secure savings instrument on the planet. If my wife had taken the cash from the piggy bank and bought bonds with them then I'd be ecstatic! This is precisely what was done with the Social Security Surplus.
I worked as a scrutineer during a Federal Election in the 80's (can't remember the exact year, Mulroney won).
The Scrutineers are permitted to oversee everything except the actual marking of the ballots (except in one exceptional case). Scrutineers are not permitted to physically touch ballots. If one falls on the floor during counting (which did happen with me), the Scrutineer alerts the Deputy Returning Officer of the fact, points out the ballot but does not touch it.
The one exceptional case where a Scrutineer may witness a ballot being marked is when a voter requests assistance from a poll worker. At that point the poll worker assists the voter and the Scrutineers witness to ensure that the poll worker is not coaching or influencing the voter.
Poll workers and Scrutineers are sworn in at each polling station, swearing to follow the rules and to not ever divulge any information about how a particular voter voted. The penalties are pretty hefty as I recall.
On the one hand, yes I do think that since the top 50% earn _more_ than 96% or the income, they should shoulder more than 96% of the burden.
Stay with me though, because we're really much closer on this than it appears. My real issue isn't with the 50-90 percentile people like you and me. I'm employed in the software industry in the San Francisco Bay Area, also single-income family. It feels like you and I are fairly close together in terms of income left over after expenses.
You and I in the middle probably (and I haven't seen the numbers so I am speculating here) are paying more than our proportion of the burden while the low-end is paying less (and that's appropriate in my opinion) while the top 2-5% are also paying much less than their equitable proportion, especially given the tax cuts that the Bush Administration want's to make permanent (at a cost of about $70 Billion / year).
Extremes are where the problems are in my opinion. The low end is just plain getting screwed (Congress recently cut $30 Billion from MedicAid) while the top end is skating by. Do I want my taxes lower? Sure! Not at the cost of destabilizing society by making it increasingly impossible for the low end to survive, let alone improve their situation.
Okay, it's not flamebait but it is misleading. The middle and bottom in the US pay significantly more than an equitable share of taxes.
The low 50% of wage earners earn less than 2% of the total income in the US, meaning that the top 50% of earners are not pulling their weight.
More to the point, the top 10% of earners earn _way_ _way_ more than 10% of the income, (I believe it's on the close order of 90% but I can't confirm it) yet pay way less than the correct proportion.
"The numerosity and substantiality of the disclosures" - Look out, they're languaging again!
All kidding aside, I continue to find it astonishing that given everything that has gone on before SCO is still persuing this. I'd dearly love to see the 217 ways they've been wronged.
After several years of pain due to SBC's (Pacific Bell at the time) computers insisting that we lived in a different zip code and thus sending the bills to the wrong place, and our refusal to pay a bill we hadn't received (once we did receive them we found several hundred dollars of errors over the previous year), it finally took the Public Utilities Commision to force them to make good on fixing the error and getting us back bills -- we got totally SBC free.
RCN provides our local phone service and internet service and they have been a joy to work with when there were issues. Not affiliated with them, just a _very_ satisfied customer (and a once-time very dissatisfied SBC customer).
Full Disclosure: I'm in the Developer Support group at eBay.
Please believe me when I tell you that the last thing we want is for you to write our code for us. We're happy to take care of keeping the eBay systems running and evolving ourselves.:-)
There is demand among the eBay user community for services that allow them to buy and sell more effectively on eBay. There is also demand among the user community for value added services related to their activities on eBay.
The goal of the Community Codebase and the changes to the Individual Tier is to enable developers who want to deploy applications that use the eBay API in interesting ways to satisfy that demand.
We have found that the more application possibilities we enable the better it is for all of us. We're not expecting anyone to develop out of the raw goodness of their hearts; we're expecting people to develop because they see an opportunity that isn't being realised, or because they have a need that isn't satisfied on the eBay site directly or among the 1500 or so existing third-party applications.
Like Adam Trachtenburg (who posted earlier), I've been involved with open source for a very long time (less visibly than Adam though). I do absolutely understand the perception that comes about when a company declares themselves Open Source in order to magically create an unpaid work force. I would never lend public support to such a move.
Cheers, Bruce Thompson Staff DTS Engineer eBay Inc.
To estabilsh some credentials here, let me say that I'm a long time, though relatively quiet advocate of Open Source. I've been running Linux since the 0.99 days and remember fondly the first version of GCC that supported C++. By this I'm trying to say that I truly do get what Open Source is all about and have been involved (on the periphery) for a very long time.
This is not about eBay trying to tap into a free labor market. If it were, I promise you I would not be here talking about it.
There are approximately 1500 third party applications that provide services to eBay members via the various API that we support. The goal of the Community CodeBase and the changes to the Individual Tier is to enable developers, particularly Open Source developers to more easily develop new applications that use the API to provide different services to eBay members.
Does eBay benefit by more applications being deployed? You bet! I'd by lying if I said it weren't true. The benefit comes from the fact that the more applications get deployed, the more items get handled more effeciently, the better it is for everyone involved (buyers, sellers, eBay).
This is not eBay opening up some of our internal core systems and hoping that gullible geeks help us with maintaining our systems, we've got large teams of engineers doing that already. If you're interested in working on the internal core systems, we are hiring...
This is about providing a way for developers who want to access the API to do so, and to share with other developers techniques and code for doing so.
First, if you have a commercial application then you do pay additional fees over and above the usual eBay fees for API calls. The amount of these fees varies depending on the membership tier, but averages out at about $2.00 per 1000 billable calls (billable calls are anything other than AddItem and RelistItem).
The way this is tracked is via the credentials sent with every API call. The first of these credentials is a Token that identifies the eBay userid on who's behalf the call is being made. Next are the Developer, Application and Certificate IDs that identify the application making the call.
The token is obtained using one of several methods all of which ultimately involve a redirect to the eBay signin page. This is done to allow eBay users to authorize your application to make calls for them without requiring them to reveal their password to your application.
The DevId, AppId and CertId are obtained via the developer program. When you first sign up a set of Sandbox Ids are generated automatically so you can immediately start trying things out in the Sandbox system (think of it as a testbed eBay system). Once your application is ready to go live there is a certification process (self-certification in the case of Individual Tier) after which Production Ids are generated.
Self certification involves filling out a short questionaire, which essentially asks you to promise you'll follow the rules. Self certification used to cost $100 but is now free. Commercial certification involves filling out a more involved document and submitting it for review by, well, me. Well, not just me, anyone on the DTS team may be reviewing it. The review may involve taking a look at the application itself, making design recommendations for how you are using the API and costs $200 as a one time fee.
So, the ultimate model you are asking about is this: every application has a set of certificates that are used to identify who's application is making the call. If you are going to distribute your application then you will also be distributing these keys. Do take steps to protect these keys! If someone malicious were to extract them from your application then they will be able to make API calls using your 10000 calls/month.
While on the one hand there are no fees or royalties of any kind to join the eBay Developers Program at the individual Tier, it is necessary to join the program in order to be able to call the eBay APIs.
I haven't checked, but I do not believe you need to be registered in the program in order to access the Community Codebase, nor to grab a copy of anything there. It's just that it won't necessarily be all that useful if you are not a member of the program as you will be unable to access our systems without membership.
If that disqualifies the program for being called "OSI acceptable" then I withdraw the claim. I do know that most if not all of the current contents of the repository are licensed under the MIT license.
It's not so much that there are other auction sites using eBay's backend but rather around 1500 applications of various sorts that provide services to eBay buyers and/or sellers. To get a sense of what's available, head over to the Solutions Directory for a list.
Full disclosure: I work for eBay in the Developer Support group.
I'm honestly not sure where the idea that we are open sourcing our search code came from. Let me quickly correct that: eBay is not open sourcing any of it's operational software.
What we are doing is creating an open source repository for our SDKs and sample code for accessing the eBay systems. What other sort of projects get hosted on the Community Codebase remains to be seen, but the idea is that eBay engineers and third-party developers will be able to work together on projects that benefit the community as a whole.
We are also changing the terms of the Individual Tier of the eBay Developers Program allowing third-party applications to access the eBay systems without any fees and with increased monthly call limits.
The APIs that are available cover searching, listing auctions, managing feedback and purchases, etc.
The benefit to the individual is to enable developers who want to be able to access the eBay site to do so without the expense of joining the Commercial Tiers of the Program; the benefit to eBay is that every new application that goes live tends to represent an increase in listings and that translates into an increase in revenue.
Cheers, Bruce Thompson Staff DTS Engineer eBay Inc.
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.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why you _always_ stuff a null-byte at the end of the buffer!
Exactly. Traffic in North America is relatively incompressible, whereas traffic in Bangalore was surprisingly compressible.
and noisy. You wouldn't believe how much they use their horns.
I lived in Bangalore for six months.
Traffic there is like nothing I've ever seen before in my life. Lane markers... they're just suggestions. Speed limits? What's that? Traffic lights, well, maybe, if there's a cop handy.
What's amazing to me is how the congestion isn't as bad as it could be, because traffic in Bangalore, and well India as a whole, is compressible. When a traffic light turns red, cars and auto-rickshaws and especially motorbikes, move in to fill the space as tightly as they can. Then when the light changes, everyone moves out and traffic flows. What that means is that while North American traffic behaves a lot like a liquid, my observation in Bangalore was that traffic behaved much more like a gas.
There was a desktop OS called Domain/OS from Apollo Systems. Rumour had it that Apollo was founded by Multicians who fled from Honneywell. It was a great OS on a lot of levels, not least you had native Domain/OS, BSD4.3 and System5 UNIX, an amazing shared filesystem, and networking that was literally plug and play.
Then of course HP bought it and killed it in favor of HP/UX, sigh.
While we don't do nearly as much direct legistlating in Canada, and while we don't elect nearly as many officials, the solution is indeed what you suggest: a separate piece of paper for each race.
The closest Canada gets to an American election in terms of numbers of races is a municipal election: Two school boards (you vote one of the two), one city council and one mayor. Each is on a separate ballot and each goes into a separate ballot box. When the poll closes the abllots for one race are dumped out onto a table, opened up, sorted into piles based on the marks and counted twice. I've witnessed this as a scrutineer representing a candidate during one election. For a typical polling place serving four poll districts the process took less than an hour for each race. The numbers are called in to the Returning Office and the ballots are sealed back into the ballot boxes to be returned to the Returning Office. Barring any dispute the elecetion is certified the next day.
The real issue is that it takes people. Each polling place needs a Deputy Returning Officer and two poll workers for each poll district, more likely two shifts of DROs and poll workers. The US does not appear to be willing to hire enough people do manage this. It's not at all a question of population size or number of issues on the ballot or anything else like that it's a matter of people.
And politics.
Elections Canada officials are professional civil servants. They do not and may not act on behalf of any candidate in any way except one: they vote for the candidate they prefer. The fundamental reason that US elections are so badly broken really has nothing to do with the ballots, the technology or even the number of people employed to execute the election: It's that the officials overseeing the process are partisans.
Ken Blackwell of Ohio is charged with overseeing his own election race to governor, and for certifying the results. What insanity is that? Talk about the definition of conflict of interest! Even if he were pure as the driven snow the appearance of impropriety would be difficult to avoid. Let's face it, given the reports out of Ohio from the 2004 election and the reports coming out of there now, he's anything but pure as the driven snow.
Cheers,
Bruce.
No necessarily.
Read Dennis Ritchie's Turing Award speech. He describes a technique that can put a back-door into login with nothing in the source. It requires the compiler's cooperation (actually, it's the compiler doing all the work) so if you can provide your own compiler then you're fine.
Or are you?
How do you know that your compiler hasn't been compromised?
Frankly, I still believe that a piece of paper with a circle you put an X in is the way to go. Canada and the UK have been doing it that way for ever and they know the full results of the election that night. Other than the requirement for enough poll workers to actually do the count, what prevents the US from adopting this?
I'm asking seriously because it doesn't make sense to me (as a Canadian living in the states) that the electorate would allow something as fundamental as their vote to be compromised like this!
The last time I voted, I know my vote was counted. Can anyone in the US be as certain?
Cheers
Physically, you're abvsolutely correct. The difference is that the price differential is a tax that the RIAA collects to offset the artists' "losses" due to copying.
So, by purchasing an Audio CD-R you are paying for the right to make a copy of a friend's CD as permitted under the AHRA.
Thanks to the AHRA (Audio Home Recording Act), making a copy of a friend's CD is indeed legal!
The reason that "Music" CD-R is more expensive than "Data" CD-R? License fees paid to the RIAA to cover the copies made in this way. The artists are supposed to get compensated from those fees, but like so much where the RIAA is involved, the artists are being left out in the cold.
Let's insist that the facts be reported rather than the RIAA and MPAA's propaganda, shall we?
This is one of the reasons I refuse to make use of the self-checkout aisles, and further refuse to do business with stores that are overloading the self-checkout.
The last time I went into my local Home Depot I had a similar experience, with a sligth twist. I had a handful of items and might have made effective use of self-checkout. The line for the self-checkout was over a dozen people long, as was the line at the one open cashier. When this sort of occurence happens I loudly comment that Lowe's seems to be much more concerned about customers and leave the store to make my purchase elsewhere.
On occasion I have taken the time to let the store manager know that I find the situation unacceptable and that his store is losing business as a result. In a WalMart world, this probably won't make a lot of difference, but I refuse to waste my time because the store couldn't be bothered to have sufficient staffing.
Unless you are either a Hockey (Winter) or Basketball (Summer) player.
The Winter Olympics Men's hockey tournament is essentially an NHL intra-squad match...
And for the Summer Olympics it's basicly the NBA vs. the World.
Remind me what the criteria is for "amateur" status?
Wow, that's got to be the clearest example of toeing the Bush Crony Talking Points I've seen today.
Let's put this chestnut to bed here and now: These so-called IOU's are US Federal Bonds. The single most secure savings instrument on the planet. If my wife had taken the cash from the piggy bank and bought bonds with them then I'd be ecstatic! This is precisely what was done with the Social Security Surplus.
Let it go!
I worked as a scrutineer during a Federal Election in the 80's (can't remember the exact year, Mulroney won).
The Scrutineers are permitted to oversee everything except the actual marking of the ballots (except in one exceptional case). Scrutineers are not permitted to physically touch ballots. If one falls on the floor during counting (which did happen with me), the Scrutineer alerts the Deputy Returning Officer of the fact, points out the ballot but does not touch it.
The one exceptional case where a Scrutineer may witness a ballot being marked is when a voter requests assistance from a poll worker. At that point the poll worker assists the voter and the Scrutineers witness to ensure that the poll worker is not coaching or influencing the voter.
Poll workers and Scrutineers are sworn in at each polling station, swearing to follow the rules and to not ever divulge any information about how a particular voter voted. The penalties are pretty hefty as I recall.
Cheers,
DrLlama.
"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,"
:-)
If'n yer gonna be pedantic, double check first
On the one hand, yes I do think that since the top 50% earn _more_ than 96% or the income, they should shoulder more than 96% of the burden.
Stay with me though, because we're really much closer on this than it appears. My real issue isn't with the 50-90 percentile people like you and me. I'm employed in the software industry in the San Francisco Bay Area, also single-income family. It feels like you and I are fairly close together in terms of income left over after expenses.
You and I in the middle probably (and I haven't seen the numbers so I am speculating here) are paying more than our proportion of the burden while the low-end is paying less (and that's appropriate in my opinion) while the top 2-5% are also paying much less than their equitable proportion, especially given the tax cuts that the Bush Administration want's to make permanent (at a cost of about $70 Billion / year).
Extremes are where the problems are in my opinion. The low end is just plain getting screwed (Congress recently cut $30 Billion from MedicAid) while the top end is skating by. Do I want my taxes lower? Sure! Not at the cost of destabilizing society by making it increasingly impossible for the low end to survive, let alone improve their situation.
Okay, it's not flamebait but it is misleading. The middle and bottom in the US pay significantly more than an equitable share of taxes.
The low 50% of wage earners earn less than 2% of the total income in the US, meaning that the top 50% of earners are not pulling their weight.
More to the point, the top 10% of earners earn _way_ _way_ more than 10% of the income, (I believe it's on the close order of 90% but I can't confirm it) yet pay way less than the correct proportion.
"The numerosity and substantiality of the disclosures" - Look out, they're languaging again!
All kidding aside, I continue to find it astonishing that given everything that has gone on before SCO is still persuing this. I'd dearly love to see the 217 ways they've been wronged.
It's getting downright pathetic....
Is RCN not available where you are?
After several years of pain due to SBC's (Pacific Bell at the time) computers insisting that we lived in a different zip code and thus sending the bills to the wrong place, and our refusal to pay a bill we hadn't received (once we did receive them we found several hundred dollars of errors over the previous year), it finally took the Public Utilities Commision to force them to make good on fixing the error and getting us back bills -- we got totally SBC free.
RCN provides our local phone service and internet service and they have been a joy to work with when there were issues. Not affiliated with them, just a _very_ satisfied customer (and a once-time very dissatisfied SBC customer).
Cheers,
DrLlama
Full Disclosure: I'm in the Developer Support group at eBay.
:-)
Please believe me when I tell you that the last thing we want is for you to write our code for us. We're happy to take care of keeping the eBay systems running and evolving ourselves.
There is demand among the eBay user community for services that allow them to buy and sell more effectively on eBay. There is also demand among the user community for value added services related to their activities on eBay.
The goal of the Community Codebase and the changes to the Individual Tier is to enable developers who want to deploy applications that use the eBay API in interesting ways to satisfy that demand.
We have found that the more application possibilities we enable the better it is for all of us. We're not expecting anyone to develop out of the raw goodness of their hearts; we're expecting people to develop because they see an opportunity that isn't being realised, or because they have a need that isn't satisfied on the eBay site directly or among the 1500 or so existing third-party applications.
Like Adam Trachtenburg (who posted earlier), I've been involved with open source for a very long time (less visibly than Adam though). I do absolutely understand the perception that comes about when a company declares themselves Open Source in order to magically create an unpaid work force. I would never lend public support to such a move.
Cheers,
Bruce Thompson
Staff DTS Engineer
eBay Inc.
Hi,
To estabilsh some credentials here, let me say that I'm a long time, though relatively quiet advocate of Open Source. I've been running Linux since the 0.99 days and remember fondly the first version of GCC that supported C++. By this I'm trying to say that I truly do get what Open Source is all about and have been involved (on the periphery) for a very long time.
This is not about eBay trying to tap into a free labor market. If it were, I promise you I would not be here talking about it.
There are approximately 1500 third party applications that provide services to eBay members via the various API that we support. The goal of the Community CodeBase and the changes to the Individual Tier is to enable developers, particularly Open Source developers to more easily develop new applications that use the API to provide different services to eBay members.
Does eBay benefit by more applications being deployed? You bet! I'd by lying if I said it weren't true. The benefit comes from the fact that the more applications get deployed, the more items get handled more effeciently, the better it is for everyone involved (buyers, sellers, eBay).
This is not eBay opening up some of our internal core systems and hoping that gullible geeks help us with maintaining our systems, we've got large teams of engineers doing that already. If you're interested in working on the internal core systems, we are hiring...
This is about providing a way for developers who want to access the API to do so, and to share with other developers techniques and code for doing so.
Cheers,
Bruce.
Hi Jen,
I'll hit your questions in order here.
First, if you have a commercial application then you do pay additional fees over and above the usual eBay fees for API calls. The amount of these fees varies depending on the membership tier, but averages out at about $2.00 per 1000 billable calls (billable calls are anything other than AddItem and RelistItem).
The way this is tracked is via the credentials sent with every API call. The first of these credentials is a Token that identifies the eBay userid on who's behalf the call is being made. Next are the Developer, Application and Certificate IDs that identify the application making the call.
The token is obtained using one of several methods all of which ultimately involve a redirect to the eBay signin page. This is done to allow eBay users to authorize your application to make calls for them without requiring them to reveal their password to your application.
The DevId, AppId and CertId are obtained via the developer program. When you first sign up a set of Sandbox Ids are generated automatically so you can immediately start trying things out in the Sandbox system (think of it as a testbed eBay system). Once your application is ready to go live there is a certification process (self-certification in the case of Individual Tier) after which Production Ids are generated.
Self certification involves filling out a short questionaire, which essentially asks you to promise you'll follow the rules. Self certification used to cost $100 but is now free. Commercial certification involves filling out a more involved document and submitting it for review by, well, me. Well, not just me, anyone on the DTS team may be reviewing it. The review may involve taking a look at the application itself, making design recommendations for how you are using the API and costs $200 as a one time fee.
So, the ultimate model you are asking about is this: every application has a set of certificates that are used to identify who's application is making the call. If you are going to distribute your application then you will also be distributing these keys. Do take steps to protect these keys! If someone malicious were to extract them from your application then they will be able to make API calls using your 10000 calls/month.
Hope this helps,
Bruce.
Hi,
While on the one hand there are no fees or royalties of any kind to join the eBay Developers Program at the individual Tier, it is necessary to join the program in order to be able to call the eBay APIs.
I haven't checked, but I do not believe you need to be registered in the program in order to access the Community Codebase, nor to grab a copy of anything there. It's just that it won't necessarily be all that useful if you are not a member of the program as you will be unable to access our systems without membership.
If that disqualifies the program for being called "OSI acceptable" then I withdraw the claim. I do know that most if not all of the current contents of the repository are licensed under the MIT license.
Cheers,
Bruce.
Hi Rosco,
It's not so much that there are other auction sites using eBay's backend but rather around 1500 applications of various sorts that provide services to eBay buyers and/or sellers. To get a sense of what's available, head over to the Solutions Directory for a list.
Cheers,
Bruce.
Full disclosure: I work for eBay in the Developer Support group.
I'm honestly not sure where the idea that we are open sourcing our search code came from. Let me quickly correct that: eBay is not open sourcing any of it's operational software.
What we are doing is creating an open source repository for our SDKs and sample code for accessing the eBay systems. What other sort of projects get hosted on the Community Codebase remains to be seen, but the idea is that eBay engineers and third-party developers will be able to work together on projects that benefit the community as a whole.
We are also changing the terms of the Individual Tier of the eBay Developers Program allowing third-party applications to access the eBay systems without any fees and with increased monthly call limits.
The APIs that are available cover searching, listing auctions, managing feedback and purchases, etc.
The benefit to the individual is to enable developers who want to be able to access the eBay site to do so without the expense of joining the Commercial Tiers of the Program; the benefit to eBay is that every new application that goes live tends to represent an increase in listings and that translates into an increase in revenue.
Cheers,
Bruce Thompson
Staff DTS Engineer
eBay Inc.
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.
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.