.NET Open Source Community – CodePlex / GitHub Comparision

The .NET segment of the open source ecosystem has been one of the fastest growing over the last few years.  The vast majority of all projects on CodePlex are .NET related, and among .NET developers CodePlex is generally the most well-known open source project hosting site.  The number of new projects started on CodePlex has been ever accelerating as shown in the following chart:

CodePlex / GitHub Comparisons

GitHub is another open source project hosting site that has been rising in popularity.  Although GitHub is primarily used by developers preferring Mac or Linux, there are also many .NET developers that use it for their projects.  Sometimes we get questions about how the .NET open source developer community compares between CodePlex and GitHub, so below includes some information around that.

Project Counts

After CodePlex, GitHub probably has the largest number of .NET projects among the various open source project hosting sites.  The following table shows both the total counts and “Popular Project” counts (projects with at least 5 followers):

Popular Projects (5+ followers)

Between the two sites there are over thirty thousand projects, although CodePlex has approximately 2.5x as many .NET projects as GitHub.  For popular projects, CodePlex has approximately 4x as many.  We’re not sure whether this is because popular .NET projects are more likely to choose CodePlex, or the community on CodePlex is more likely to make a .NET project popular, but it is probably some combination of both.

* GitHub does not require developers to specify a license, and typically less than half of them do.  Without a license specified, a project is not considered true “Open Source” since without specifying a valid open source license, project users do not actually have the legal rights that an open source license provides.  The above table counts the total number, not just the number of C# projects with an open source license specified.

Popular Projects

I think another interesting statistic is the percentage of total projects that are “Popular” using the same metric of having 5 or more followers.  The following table shows the popular project percentage for CodePlex and GitHub, including for just the subset of GitHub projects that are C# and Objective-C:

The percentage of popular projects on CodePlex is higher than for C# projects on GitHub, but both are higher than the percentage of popular projects across all languages on GitHub. However for Objective-C projects on GitHub, a very high percentage of them are popular. GitHub is very popular among Mac developers, so is presumably the correlation there.

Overall Summary

I think it is great to see the growth in the .NET open source community, and all indications are it will only continue growing faster. I believe CodePlex has done a lot to help encourage and support .NET open source developers and look forward to helping many thousand more open source projects become popular and successful!

Defaults set policy on Google Code and CodePlex forges

My Italian friend Roberto Galoppini (right) has a way of answering questions most analysts are not even asking.

He sometimes does this by examining defaults.

We know, for instance, that carriers wrecked Android by making their own offerings into defaults on phones they controlled. The idea was that while the savvy might complain, and a few might jailbreak their gear, most users would not know the difference and empty their pockets into carriers’ vaults.

Thus, you might say something is open, but through your actions you have it treated as closed.

Recently, Galoppini took this insight to Microsoft CodePlex and Google Code, both of which now claim to be very, very open.

Guess what he found?

The license options Google offers Code users by default do not include the AGPL, which it now loudly claims to support.

To offer your code with this license you have to select “Other Open Source,” then write it in. It is, in other words, a Murkowski license. You have to know it and write it in to get it.

Codeplex does the same thing, he found. Its box lists the Microsoft licenses that are no longer popular, according to Black Duck Software. And it doesn’t list more popular licenses like the Artistic License or GPLv3.

That’s not all. Google Code search does not, by default, let you search by license or by download popularity, a very popular metric. You can get licenses by turning on the “label” function, but the numbers are considered private. Microsoft Codeplex search, on the other hand, does allow these sorts.

In business you can say whatever you want, and while it may be technically true, you can still tweak things to make it untrue in practice. This is what carriers have done with Android. It’s what these corporate forges also seem to be doing.

CodePlex Foundation becomes OuterCurve

The CodePlex Foundation, originally created to support Microsoft’s CodePlex code site, has been renamed the OuterCurve Foundation to help make its mission clearer.

The mission is to unlock the value in corporate code vaults, building a museum of projects with complete development and documentation support.

Since its launch a year ago, the foundation has developed a governance model, hired key staff, and elected an independent board. The board also created a process for accepting projects, and has brought in nine to date.

Paula Hunter is executive director of the foundation, which is based in Wakefield, Mass. but incorporated in Washington state. She made the announcement in conjunction with the Open World Forum meetings in Paris, which will be covered extensively by ZDNet Open Source.

Before we both headed east, Hunter discussed the effort with ZDNet.

“People thought we owned Codeplex and we never had a legal relationship. It’s Microsoft’s forge. The foundation was a separate entity whose mission was enabling the exchange of code and creating open source communities. We’re not a forge, our projects can use any forge.”

So is this more like Eclipse or Apache? “What distinguishes us from Eclipse and Apache is that we’re license agnostic and platform agnostic. We are also not imposing a strict development methodology. We’re providing guidelines, we’re showing what the process should be, but we’re not dictating.” To date six projects have been approved under the new guidelines.

This does not mean OuterCurve will just be a collection of random projects. “We created a museum model. We have galleries, which are sponsored. Galleries are collections of projects centered around some theme – like the .ASP .NET gallery or the systems infrastructure and integration gallery.

“The gallery manager is the person to connect with initially,” if you’re interested in launching a project under the OuterCurve structure. Over time the hope is that gallery managers will be seen as leaders within their fields. (Programming frogs will become development princes?)

The foundation will hold all IP rights, and provide infrastructure back-up, “like getting co-sign certificates, or helping get money together for documentation,” Hunter explained.

By providing structure and support for corporate-backed code, OuterCurve hopes to coax more of this code out of corporate vaults and transform it into open source projects that will have a wide following, Hunter said.

It’s a point Sam Ramji, the former Microsoft employee who still serves as the President of Outercurve’s board, said in a variety of ways when I interviewed him over the last two years. Open source development is becoming a mainstream IT strategy, but IT departments are looking for a model to turn that strategy into reality.

OpenCurve’s mission is to provide that strategy and create that reality.