On June 27th, Microsoft officially launched a source code sharing forum for the developer community.
This initiative is the result of Microsoft’s CodePlex project. In fact, this is a forum designed to share Microsoft’s source code as well as source code from other developers, according to Jon Rosenberg, the director of Microsoft’s open-source community program.
The developers have been testing this forum since May 2006, but it was only introduced to the developer community today.
“We want to create a place for the developer community to collaborate with us or provide their feedback on Microsoft’s projects,” Rosenberg stated.
CodePlex is different from other online communities, as it allows developers to modify or develop various source codes.
The source code submitted to the forum will be freely published without adhering to any licensing terms, Rosenberg confirmed. Microsoft will also provide some of its own code as part of the Share Source Initiative (SSI) licensing plan. To access the source code under this plan, various conditions must be met.
Last October, Microsoft revised and simplified its licensing terms. To date, Microsoft has published 7.5 million lines of source code under the SSI licensing terms on the website www.microsoft.com/sharedsource.
Microsoft has also streamlined the CodePlex website interface to make it more appealing to developers. “This is a website designed to be community-oriented rather than proprietary to Microsoft,” Rosenberg noted.
The forum primarily targets software developers, and as of now, there are 35 open-source development projects available on CodePlex, more than half of which are external to Microsoft.
CodePlex uses Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server to facilitate source code collaboration and bug detection.
Users must register before they can publish or modify source code.
The CodePlex forum can be found at www.codeplex.com.
Hoàng Dũng
