01 December 2011, 12:07

The first two years of the Outercurve Foundation

The Executive Director of the Outercurve Foundation, Paula Hunter, has reflected on the first two years of the foundation's existence. The open source organisation now hosts 17 projects, with 175 contributors – 47 per cent of the developers involved are not employed by Microsoft, the founding sponsor of the foundation.

Among the projects hosted by Outercurve are the ASP.NET development projects Orchard, MVC Contrib and NuGet, and industry-specific projects such as the bioinformatics toolkit .NET Bio and electricity grid performance analysis software GADS. The GADS project was the first GPL-licensed project to be brought under the OuterCurve umbrella.

The Outercurve Foundation started life as the CodePlex Foundation, with Microsoft as founding and, still, sole, sponsor. The name was changed two years ago to avoid confusion with Microsoft's open source project hosting site, CodePlex.com. The foundation's mission is to bring together commercial software vendors and the open source community around various projects and to encourage greater cooperation. The foundation provides legal structure, business operations and technical services for these projects.

(ehe)

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