Codeplex Foundation Becomes OuterCurve

Codeplex Foundation, the Microsoft-backed body attempting to combine open source and proprietary business models, has rebranded as OuterCurve, to avoid long-standing confusion.

The Foundation, which launched one year ago, has faced criticism in the past because its founder Microsoft – which has been hostile to open source – claims patent rights over some Linux code. The Foundation is now striving for more independence from its initial sponsor. Microsoft is keen to be seen to have acknowledged the role of Linux, but will have no direct ties to OuterCurve.

Codeplex Foundation has also often been confused with Codeplex.com, a forge which is owned and operated by Microsoft. The rebranding should prevent this confusion in future.

A good time to change

“It’s a good time to rename to help remove the naming confusion with the Microsoft forge site,” said OuterCurve technical director Stephen Walli. “It’s the first anniversary of the Foundation, and we continue to grow and build momentum around our mission. It’s an exciting time with many other good things coming in the pipeline.”

The benefits outweigh the recognition (good and bad) which the Codeplex name has gathered, said Walli. The Foundation recently was given credit for some work which was carried out within the forge, he explained, and a different name will make the separation clearer.

In the last year, the foundation has hired management (principally Walli and executive director Paula Hunter) and elected an independent board of directors, set up a process for accepting and supporting contributed open source projects, and evolved a mission – to be a home for commercially-oriented open source projects, which is not tied to one particular open source licence model.

“Open source development is becoming a mainstream IT strategy, but IT departments are looking for a model to turn that strategy into reality,” said Sam Ramji, president of the OuterCurve board, and a former director of platform strategy at Microsoft.

Future OuterCurve projects

So far Codeplex/OuterCurve has accepted six projects, which are grouped into two “galleries”, the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery and the Systems Infrastructure and Integration Gallery. The projects include libraries for ASP.NET development, package management systems and projects to analyse network protocol traffic.

“The name ‘Outercurve Foundation’ speaks to our ambition to be a foundation on the leading edge of the open source world, representing the interests of the growing audience of developers and corporations engaging with the traditional FOSS community,” said Hunter.

Many open source people are suspicious of proprietary software companies, including Microsoft with its deal with Novell to support SUSE Linux. At the same time, many commercial enterprises are suspicious of open source, and OuterCurve has set itself the task of dealing with both these issues.