The CodePlex Foundation (http://codeplex.org/; Twitter @codeplex_f), which was started back in September of this year, has been trying to gain traction and momentum. Unfortunately, its pro tempore Board of Directors and President are all volunteers already with overflowing plates, so progress hasn’t been particularly visible.
Nevertheless, progress is being made. On October 21st, the CPF released its initial draft of its proposed guidelines for project acceptance, which was discussed on the Google group/mailing list the Foundation is currently using for public interaction. And on October 29th, Sam Ramji (Twitter @sramji), late of Microsoft’s open software group and currently the CPF‘s temporary President, was interviewed by Paul Gillin. In addition, members of the Foundation’s team met last week with members of The Apache Software Foundation (http://apache.org/) at the latter’s tenth anniversary ApacheCon conference in Oakland, California. I understand the discussions were extremely productive.
One of the initial goals of the Foundation was to be up and running, with a staff, some projects, and way made for a permanent Board and President by the current temporary team, within 100 days of the Foundation’s inception. That date is coming up in December.
The front page of the Foundation’s site states its mission as:
Enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities
So is the thrust going to be on companies wanting to expose some of their code as open projects? On existing open projects with some commercial adoption already? New projects being formed by collaborating companies and communities? Big ol’ projects like the ASF or Gnome? Or what?
Personally, I hope all of the above. Time will tell. However, it’s probably still early enough for people to affect the answer to that question, by participating on the CPF‘s mailing list. If you have an opinion or an interest, I encourage you to speak up now.