We use a lot of open source libraries and components in our daily business. Open source libraries provide us a big advantage regarding time to market with our products. Every time when we are facing a problem in our software (problem is related to business domain to implementation domain difficulties) we first look into the open source world if someone has already solved that problem or even parts of it. Sourceforge, codeplex and google code (to name a few) are often the first pages we visit to look for code samples, libraries and frameworks. But how can we find the needle in the haystack?

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Have you ever been thinking in one of your commercial projects of how one particular open source tool or frameworks could solve a lot of your problems but there were to many uncertainties in terms of licensing, compliance to your customers needs and law impediments etc.?

I think you have. Must people now tend to say go for Apache 2 license and you won’t have to worry to much because you have almost any rights to change and adapt the provided code (naively speaking). Recently the CodePlex Foundation was founded to bridge the gap between Open Source Projects and commercial closed source projects. Their goal is to bring together commercial software companies and open source communities. If you want to know more about the CodePlex Foundation I suggest you watch the video below or get a brief overview of what they are doing be reading their mission and governance statements.

Bill Wagner posted some nice thoughts about the CodePlex Foundation on his blog if you are looking for further information.

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