CodePlex Splits

The goal of the new, independent CodePlex Foundation, funded by Microsoft, is to facilitate collaboration between companies and open source developers. However, Microsoft will retain its current CodePlex Web site, which started with substantially similar goals. Additionally Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s senior director of Platform Strategy is leaving the company. Both announcements underscore Microsoft’s struggle to gain trust and work with the open source community to attract its members to work with the Microsoft platform and products; but to succeed the foundation needs participation from the community and Microsoft needs to replace Ramji with someone of equal stature with developers.

Two Separate CodePlexes

The new nonprofit CodePlex Foundation has been set up by Microsoft to “build a set of practices and processes that facilitate better collaboration between the participating companies, industry partners, and open source communities.”

Although Microsoft is giving the “CodePlex” name and CodePlex.org domain to the Foundation, it will continue to host CodePlex.com, a site that began in 2006 to build a community of developers working together on software projects that complement Microsoft products. Similar to open source developer sites such as SourceForge, but built on Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server, the CodePlex.com site gives developers a way to collaborate and includes source code management and bug tracking capabilities.