(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) – DotNetNuke (www.dotnetnuke.com) co-founder and chief architect Shaun Walker has joined the interim board of directors of the CodePlex Foundation, which formally launched Thursday with the goal of enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open-source communities.
DotNetNuke Corp. is the company behind the most widely used web content management system and application development framework for building Microsoft .NET websites and applications. With his extensive professional experience implementing large-scale open source software solutions for private and public organizations, and his commitment to DotNetNuke, the most successful open source community project on the Microsoft platform, Walker plans to bring a unique, practical, open-source perspective to the board.
“The CodePlex Foundation’s mission to enable the exchange of code and knowledge between software companies and open source communities and drive better understanding between these two groups is vital for the future growth and success of the open source movement,” Walker said in a statement. “I look forward to joining the distinguished group of software experts on the Board to foster better collaboration and knowledge sharing between these ecosystems.”
Due to differing views on development methodology and intellectual property, software developers often under-participate in open-source projects, and the CodePlex Foundation hopes to address these critical challenges, complement existing open-source foundations, and create a dialogue between software companies and open-source developers and their projects.
Founded by Microsoft, which invested $1 million in the project, the CodePlex Foundation will remain “license-and project-agnostic,” according to Microsoft, enabling the neutral exchange of code and knowledge between software companies and open source communities. The licensing agreements and the processes that Foundation members have pioneered will be made available to the community at large and will be instrumental to software companies looking for a way to contribute to open-source projects.
Sam Ramji will serve as interim president and will be supported by an interim board of directors that includes Walker, Microsoft web platform and tools engineering teams general manager Bill Staples, Microsoft program management director Stephanie Boesch, Microsoft SQL unit manager Britt Johnston, and Novell developer platform vice president Miguel de Icaza.
“Today, software developers under-participate in open source projects, often due to cultural differences between software companies and open source communities or differing views on software development methodology and intellectual property,” Ramji said in a statement. “The CodePlex Foundation was designed to foster more collaboration between these groups and I look forward to working with Shaun to help change practices where it makes sense to do so, and foster greater shared understanding between these stakeholders.”
CodePlex will be competing directly with open-source community SourceForge (www.sourceforge.net). CodePlex’s platform is suspected to offer more stability and reliability over its outage-plagued competitor, however, SourceForge has recently been given free mirrors by CDNetworks and Hivelocity.
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