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Submission guidelines created for CodePlex


By Alex Handy
November 19, 2009 — 
When Microsoft announced its newly formed non-profit open-source community, CodePlex, in September, the goal was to provide an entity to help guide corporate open-source contributions. The exact mechanism of this help was undefined, but recently CodePlex released its first set of submission guidelines.

These guidelines still do not address the underlying goals of CodePlex, but they are a start, said Sam Ramji, the interim director of CodePlex. Ramji left Microsoft in October, where he headed up the company’s efforts to engage and contribute to open-source projects. He said the initial guidelines for code submissions are there to help guide Microsoft partners and other companies that have yet to engage with the open-source community.

“We believe that the software industry will become better if software companies on a larger scale can consistently and sustainably contribute to open-source projects," said Ramji. "That's not a big issue for the biggest projects, such as Eclipse, Apache and Mozilla, but now we've just named the top 100 [open-source] projects.

“There are 350,000 open-source projects. Of the 75,000 ISVs, the percentage of them making contributions is incredibly low. We think the reasons for that the mechanism of how you contribute as a typical commercial entity is not well understood," he added.

Thus, CodePlex will offer guidelines and samples from existing projects to show companies how best to contribute to open-source projects.

Are patents a roadblock?
Bernard Golden, CEO of Navica, an open-source systems integrator, and author of “Succeeding with Open Source,” said that the lack of such an entity hasn't slowed down open-source contributions from corporate entities. He said that the interesting aspect of CodePlex is the non-profit's ability to hold patent and copyright protections for Microsoft's contributions, as well as for contributions from other companies.

When asked about Golden’s observation, Ramji said that intellectual-property protection is a goal for CodePlex, and that the initial guidelines explain some of the methods needed to provide patent and copyright protections to downstream users.

But Golden is still skeptical of the CodePlex claim that companies are unsure of how to contribute back to open source.

“Looking at actual practice, companies are embracing open source and using it a lot. It doesn't seem like the threat of patents or trademark issues are hanging over them to the point where they'd say, 'Let's go be part of this CodePlex thing,' ” said Golden.

“Most open-source projects come from an individual or a small group of people. An individual or small group isn't that attracted to say, 'I want to go work with Microsoft. I've got to be protected against patent infringement.' ”


Related Search Term(s): CodePlex, Microsoft, open source


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