Via Network World

Microsoft is hoping to fire up a community of developers on a code-sharing forum the company has been testing since May but rolled out officially on Tuesday.

The project, called CodePlex, is a forum for Microsoft code and code from other developers, said Jon Rosenberg, director of community source programs at Microsoft.

"We're actually establishing a venue for the development community to collaborate with us and feed back into these projects," Rosenberg said.

CodePlex is not unlike many online communities where developers modify and develop source code. In recent years, Microsoft has extended olive branches to open source developers after being criticized for its fierce protection of its own source code.

Code contributed to the site can be posted under any licensing terms, Rosenberg said. Microsoft is offering some of its source code under its own Share Source Initiative (SSI) licensing plan, which offers access to source code under varying conditions.

The software titan revamped and simplified the language of those licenses last October. Microsoft has released 7.5 million lines of code under SSI licenses, available here.

Microsoft has softened the look of the CodePlex Web site, perhaps to make it more appealing to developers in the open source camp. Instead of the Microsoft logo, it has a green banner that says "CodePlex."

"This is really designed to be a site that is in some ways owned as much by the community as it is by Microsoft," Rosenberg said. "We just thought a more neutral branding was appropriate."

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