Microsoft Launches CodePlex, a New Collaborative Development Portal

Posted Jun 28, 2006 14:29 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: Microsoft Launches CodePlex, a New Collaborative Development Portal by meffie
Parent article: Microsoft Launches CodePlex, a New Collaborative Development Portal

Sounds very similar to Rosetta/Launchpad stuff. Even down to the excuse for not openning it up.

Just replace 'Codeplex' with 'Launchpad' and 'Microsoft' with 'Canonical' and you got yourself a pretty damn close match. ;)

(although launchpad folks promise to open it up if they get people to work on stuff. (any Zope/Python hackers interested?))

What I would be much more worried about would be the licensing of the software that passes through Microsoft's stuff. For instance if you read the licensing on Microsoft source code samples they provide with their development tools.. It's ok to use Microsoft's provided code in your applications provided that you keep it closed source and make it so that end users have to run Windows to run your programs.

Anything that Microsoft touches needs to be held suspect and be considured tainted IMO. If given a chance they'll do everything they can to leverage 'open source' to destroy 'free software'. They aren't afraid of source code they can legally use without having to open up anything themselves, given the history of BSD code in Windows. (BSD TCP/IP stack for NT, OpenBSD as 'Windows services for Unix', etc etc) In fact I think that they would be VERY HAPPY to promote open source if it ment other people programming for them for free. (don't get me wrong.. I am not going anti-bsd or anti-opensolaris or anything. If don't mind your code being used to sell propriatory software then that's fine with me)

Microsoft, Canonical, LWN

Posted Jun 28, 2006 16:27 UTC (Wed) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link] (2 responses)

That also sounds similar to LWN, which -- correct me if I'm mistaken -- has yet to release the code that runs this site. I'm inclined to cut LWN some slack on that issue, so it's hard to be angry at Canonical or even Microsoft for the same thing. At least Microsoft has no shortage of actual transgressions that would make this particular issue merit attention. For instance, your point about using open source as leverage against free software is a good one.

Microsoft, Canonical, LWN

Posted Jun 29, 2006 8:57 UTC (Thu) by job (guest, #670) [Link] (1 responses)

There's a great deal of difference in the data being locked up. In the case on Launchpad/Codeplex it's code, and in the case of LWN it's our insightful comments. Absolutely no offense to anybody, but perhaps one is more important to free software than the other. :)

Microsoft, Canonical, LWN

Posted Jul 3, 2006 18:27 UTC (Mon) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link]

Perhaps I've misunderstood, but my impression is that Canonical's Launchpad, Microsoft's CodePlex and the LWN code are software packages that make up web applications. None of them seem designed to lock up the data they manage and even if that's incorrect the organizations involved could release the code without accepting external changes, so the availability of their source code seems unrelated to the status of that data.

No offense taken with regard to the relative importance of comments and code. :-)