Microsoft Launches New Open Source CodePlex Foundation

Microsoft’s strategy with open source has evolved over the past several years as we strive to make Windows the platform of choice for customers.  My team has participated in that process first hand, we’ve worked hard with the PHP community to ensure PHP runs great on Windows, integrated PHP installation into the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, and engaged some of the most popular PHP applications like WordPress, Drupal, and SugarCRM to ensure customers have a great experience running these applications on Windows and IIS.  We’ve also worked closely with the jQuery project to make it a natural part of building applications with ASP.NET. 

Today I am happy to be a part of the announcement that Microsoft is sponsoring an open source foundation aptly named CodePlex Foundation, whose mission is to “enable the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities”.  I believe the foundation will make it easier for Microsoft and other commercial software companies to participate in open source.  You can read more about the announcement in my interview with Peter Galli on Port25 and learn more about the foundation at http://codeplex.org. 

The CodePlex Foundation is a completely separate organization from Microsoft.  To help form the foundation, we have formed an interim board of directors comprised of three Microsoft employees and three non-Microsoft employees, and elected Sam Ramji as the President of the Board.  Microsoft has also donated $1 million US dollars to help the foundation get started and is transferring the use rights to the “CodePlex” term, along with the codeplex.org domain name to the CodePlex Foundation. 

I feel lucky to be a part of the interim board of directors as we spend the next 100 days working together with the board of advisors, partners and you to structure how the foundation will work.  We don’t have all of the answers and need your help to make it a success.  You can read more about how to participate here: http://codeplex.org/participate.aspx

 

As always, I look forward to hearing your comments and suggestions about the new foundation.

1 Comment

  • Hi Anonymous -

    Microsoft will continue to run the CodePlex.com site and serve the more than 10,000+ projects that are hosted there. CodePlex.com is similar to other project hosting sites like SourceForge, Google Code, etc. and is not an open source foundation. CodePlex.com shares it's name with CodePlex foundation because they both share the mission of enabling commercial companies and open source communities to collaborate.

    There is no other formal relationship between the CodePlex Foundation and CodePlex.com run by Microsoft. I anticipate the foundation will accept projects hosted on CodePlex.com or any other project hosting site. For more information on common questions like this one, see the FAQ posted on http://codeplex.org/faq-mission.aspx

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