Thoughts, follow-up
June 24th, 2005In a rather recent post I said:
What if a project like ebay open sourced its code under a license that only allowed people to contribute back to the project? So instead of allowing everyone to deploy their own ebay, people interested in helping would improve the single large project. If someone had a user interface annoyance, for example, they could write up a patch and send it in.
And now, a few weeks later slashdot is reporting:
eBay Starts Open-Source Community
The software will be available under a new program called Community Codebase, which was announced at the eBay Developers Conference in San Jose, California, on Tuesday. The Community Codebase is free for all members of eBay’s Developers Program and PayPal Developer Network. (Pay Pal is owned by eBay.) It allows individual developers and companies to access source code for various eBay and PayPal tools and applications. An example is a Java application that allows TiVo users to search and bid on items via their digital video recorder boxes. Other examples include a Firefox toolbar, various Pay Pal toolkits and an application used to extract information from Pay Pal’s database and putting it into Microsoft Corp.’s Excel spreadsheet software.
Probably just a coincidence, but still — maybe people are reading this thing….
