Black Duck Blog

Tim Yeaton
President and CEO
tyeaton@blackducksoftware.com

The Codeplex Foundation announcement by Microsoft is a reflection of and reinforcement of the continuing trend toward multi-source development, and a new pragmatism on the part of developers. I spend a lot of time with our customers, all of whom are development organizations of one type or another. Every sizeable development shop I visit is engaged in some level of multi-source development – integrating open source code with ISV and internally developed code to speed development and reduce costs. I call it the “new pragmatism” because, given the economics of open source and its other benefits, commercial development organizations can’t afford to reinvent the wheel when proven code is readily available…especially when they are working in a tight budget environment, with no relief on the development backlog. And since most development shops are working in some fashion with Microsoft code, tools, or applications, it seems equally pragmatic that Microsoft find a way to embrace open source in a more significant way. An interesting fact from Black Duck’s experience: of all the downloads of the free IDE plug-ins from our open source code search site www.koders.com, 75% are for Microsoft Visual Studio. That says to me that there is significant interest in Microsoft tools and code from a large portion of the development community that is also using open source.

There are many voices in the open source community, and in many quarters Microsoft is viewed with significant skepticism. But in this pragmatic, budget-constrained, multi-source world we live, commercial developers care less and less about ideology or even Microsoft’s motives. What they care about is finding the right code for the job and having the creative freedom to use it – and that’s what Black Duck is working to enable. Developers also care about honoring intellectual property rights and the intentions of the original authors…they want to play by the rules and to respect the rights of authors to dictate the rules for use of their code.

Microsoft continues to demonstrate more seriousness about embracing open source, in the context of multi-source application development. One example is their Codeplex repository. It has grown significantly in popularity over the last year recently reaching 10,000 projects, which suggests it is meeting a customer/developer need. The Codeplex Foundation looks like another step along this path…in particular, potentially addressing the need they’ve identified – enabling discussion and ultimately broader commercial adoption of open source.

People will rightly question Microsoft’s motives for creating the Codeplex Foundation. The fact that they created an independent foundation indicates that they have thought about some of the underlying issues. And to look back at some relevant open source history, if Codeplex evolves the way the Eclipse Foundation did, which in its early days was staffed and championed by IBM, it could grow to take on a meaningful role regarding multi-source development in the open source community.