Ask Sam Ramji About the CodePlex Foundation 77
This week the Codeplex Foundation announced its first project, the ASP.NET Ajax Library Project, as part of its first sponsored gallery, the ASP.NET Gallery. The CodePlex Foundation is now two months old, and Foundation President Sam Ramji has agreed to answer questions about the Foundation, its first project, and overall progress to date. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply.
Conspiracy theories and where are you guys headed? (Score:1, Insightful)
What do you say to the inevitable flood of "advocates" who claim Microsoft is doing this sort of thing to subvert FOSS?
Bonus points: Do you see Microsoft headed in the same general direction as Google and IBM where the core products and IP are held close to the chest while some of the more peripheral stuff (not key to revenue) is released under open licenses? Recent news like the open sourcing of one of the versions of the .NET framework make it seem that way.
Double bonus points: Do you see Microsoft ever releasing the whole of .NET itself under a non-restrictive license? Do you think there would be some benefit to Microsoft in pulling something akin to Sun GPL'ing Java and still retaining control over its direction? I ask this because it would end a lot of problems (imagined and real) with Mono, for example. But that would imply a lot of work with things like WinForms, ASP.NET and parts of the data client stack, without which any .NET implementation cannot help but be seen as a interesting experiment rather than as a valid enterprise-ready alternative.
To be clear, I would love to see Codeplex lead the way in facilitating a truly cross-platform alternative to .NET on the Windows platform. If that's Mono, great. Perhaps within Microsoft something like this is seen as a threat, but you guys need to get past that mindset. How come I can robustly host PHP or Python apps on Server 2003 today but I can't do the same with .NET in BSD? The Mono team has already done most of the heavy lifting, all you guys need to do is clear up the air around it!
(sorry for the multiple questions, these are things I've been thinking about lately a lot)
Non-Microsoft technologies? (Score:4, Insightful)
Will priority be given to those using Microsoft tools, or can anyone play?
SourceForge.net (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not contribute to SourceForge.net instead of unnecessarly duplicating it?
"IP needs"? (Score:4, Insightful)
From your FAQ:
We wanted a foundation that addresses a full spectrum of software projects, and does so with the licensing and intellectual property needs of commercial software companies in mind.
This seems to imply that there are existing foundations that do so without those licensing and IP needs. Regardless, what do you see as the role of a foundation like yours in addressing the needs of commercial software companies?
Re:SourceForge.net (Score:4, Insightful)
Ugh, 'cuz sourceforge sucks balls? Shitty layout. Slow as hell. Seriously, I welcome a decent alternative to SourceForge (not that this is necessarily it).
Re:A gallery... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the CodePlex Foundation has some sort of distinction between a gallery and a repository. I spoke for 30 minutes with Ramji a few weeks back, and yet I still have absolutely no idea what those differences are. He said that these galleries weren't about code, but rather about the ways corporations contribute code into them.
So, here's the first question: What is the difference between a Gallery and a Repository?
Microsoft Front (Score:5, Insightful)
The about page [codeplex.org] says "Our Board of Directors is an interim board" and that they will pick the new board but that's no too encouraging given who's doing the picking. CodePlex seems like Microsoft trying to create a community.
Re:SourceForge.net (Score:4, Insightful)
Or they feel they can do a better job and see no point in wasting time trying to fix Sourceforge, which has been on a steadily decline since it first hit the OSS scene?
Seriously, SF has plenty of resources behind it... the fact that it sucks (IMHO) suggests there's something systemic going on there, and if I were MS, I wouldn't want to go anywhere near it.
Re:A gallery... (Score:3, Insightful)
maybe the appropriate question is, why should this answer bs eo complicated?
Re:SourceForge.net (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you ever tried to use Sourceforge? It's slow, ugly, constantly gives vague errors, image uploads constantly fail, terrible UI, forgets which page you were on before logging in, awful bug tracking with insultingly-named fields (canned response!)...
A better question is, "why would any project actually interested in user feedback use Sourceforge?"
Re:Microsoft Front (Score:3, Insightful)
"Half the Board of Directors, and half of the Advisory Board are from Microsoft. Why should we think that this anything but a Microsoft front?"
Because if it were a "front" you wouldn't have known that Microsoft was involved.
Re:SourceForge.net (Score:3, Insightful)
Assuming you're comparing CodePlex the website (which isn't the same thing as CodePlex the foundation) to SourceForge, then I'd imagine one reason is that CodePlex uses TFS for source control and related stuff. Aside from being a showcase, some people might actually prefer that to SourceForge offerings, especially when they code to MS stack already, and use non-Express Visual Studio edition (which has decent TFS integration).