Why Codeplex Will Grow Away From Microsoft

He sees a pent-up demand to contribute in many organisations, and a vast amount of software that could be moved into a better development model. Against that, Codeplex has a difficult history, in that it started with one large sonsor, and a confusiong between the Foundation and the Codeplex forge.

Ultimately, the Foundation must not be Microsoft-dominated, Walli believes. He told me that the Foundation is looking to sign up more big sponsors – a crucial step: “If new sponsors can’t be found, the CodePlex Foundation will remain dependent on Microsoft, and that will undermine its credibility completely,” said Glyn Moody in a blog.

Talking to me, Walli acknowledged the importance, hinted that things might happen soon… but could give no more news than that.

The foundation also has to convince users that it is sufficiently open, and it is actually offering a useful service, It is prepared to host any kind of open source project, whether or not it runs on Microsoft platforms or comes from Microsoft competitors, said Walli. “In our first five  months, we have six projects, two of which are not from Microsoft,” he pointed out.

Licence agnostic – and forge agnostic

The difference is that it is “licence agnostic”. That is unique, he said: “No one is solving that problem.” It is also agnostic about which forge a project will be hosted on.

Some people have said there is no need for the Foundation, given the existence of the Apache Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation – but both of these spun out of specific projects, and are built on specific forms of open source licence, said Walli.

Codeplex will support multiple projects. Some of the projects may be extensions to existing Microsoft products, which can be developed better in an open source world, and which will have different kinds of licence.

ist there, which use Apache, Eclipse, or other licences:  “Eclipse requires an Eclipse licence, and Apache requires an Apache licence, even the Free Software Foundation demands a particular licence.”

Open systems… to open source

Given Walli’s involvement with the 1990s open systems community, I asked, what is the connection between the two?

“We have shared software for as long as we have written software,” says Walli. “The idea is there in the original notebooks where John Von Neumann had the ‘Aha!’ moment, and realised that data and instructions could be the same thing. Even with the very first hand-built computers, when researchers begged for time on the night shift, they were sharing algorithms, because getting software right is hard work.”

The Unix research community, from the late 60s and early 70s, he believes, is where the ideas developed that became the basis of the open source world we know today, and choices were made on the basis of the licences available.  For instance,  in the 1990s, Walli’s firm Softway Systems developed a Posix (standardised Unix) interface for Microsoft’s WindowsNT operating system. “We used the BSD4.4 Lite Unix version as our founding code base, because AT&T had declared it could be used in that way,” says Walli.

“Even on the commercial side, you could go to a DECUS (Digital Equipment Corp user group) conference, and for the wild sum of $75, you could buy a tape full of software, shared under all kinds of licences,” said Walli.

“Standards happen at a particular time in a marketplace,” he explained. “The incumbent overdelivers to the point that customers can’t absorb the new technology and are tired of paying for what they don’t need.” At this point, the rivals gang up behind an available open standard.

“The Unix wars were not about Unix,” he said. “The Unix wars were about taking away Digital’s dominance in the minicomputer market.”  Similarly, the document wars involved everyone except Microsoft backing the available ODF specification from Open Office against Microsoft’s OOXML.

A long while on from that, the Unix wars are not only over, but so is Unix itself. “Unix is dead, and Solaris is collapsing,” he said, even though Oracle has snapped Solaris up cheaply as possible, “in order to build a new IBM.”

But all of that is a side issue. Open source, is now a long way from this kind of vendor war – although commerce continues unabated there.