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Programming The Almighty Buck The Internet IT Technology

eBay Starts Open-Source Community 110

Posted by Zonk from the sharing-with-the-bidders dept.
Matt wrote to mention a MacWorld story discussing a new initiative by auction site eBay to open source parts of its search functionality, in order to expand their coder resources. From the article: " The software will be available under a new program called Community Codebase, which was announced at the eBay Developers Conference in San Jose, California, on Tuesday. The Community Codebase is free for all members of eBay's Developers Program and PayPal Developer Network. (Pay Pal is owned by eBay.) It allows individual developers and companies to access source code for various eBay and PayPal tools and applications. An example is a Java application that allows TiVo users to search and bid on items via their digital video recorder boxes. Other examples include a Firefox toolbar, various Pay Pal toolkits and an application used to extract information from Pay Pal's database and putting it into Microsoft Corp.'s Excel spreadsheet software."
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eBay Starts Open-Source Community More

eBay Starts Open-Source Community

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  • Share the sUck (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Talk about stupid... eBay already sucks, so they want to share it.
    • How do they "suck"? I'm curious as to why you think that, as a public bidding service like eBay has been a great source of income for some and a great place for deals for others.
      • I'm not sure why, but I've also always had the feeling that ebay was tres suck... their website is a bit slow, and loads funny. I can't wait for google wallet to pwn paypal, I have a lot more faith that google will get a lot of things right that these guys get wrong.

  • interesting (Score:3, Interesting)

    by R.D.Olivaw ( 826349 ) on Friday June 24, 2005 @08:01AM (#12899567)
    What exactly is the definition of 'open source'. Could you open code to a specific community and still call it open source?

  • Open source eBay? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by randomErr ( 172078 ) <ervin.kosch@gmailOPENBSD.com minus bsd> on Friday June 24, 2005 @08:02AM (#12899573) Journal
    eBay to open source parts of its search functionality, in order to expand their coder resources.

    Isn't this the same eBay that was suing people who were making auction search sites that linked to eBay items?

  • What about the fees? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by shawiiing ( 888655 ) on Friday June 24, 2005 @08:02AM (#12899576)
    Currently eBay charges as little as a hundred dollars but up to $50,000 dollars before you can run your code against the production database. I think the open source move is a good one however some of us developers with limited resources won't be jumping on until it is "free as in beer".

    • Re:What about the fees? (Score:5, Informative)

      by DrLlama ( 213075 ) on Friday June 24, 2005 @08:22AM (#12899766) Homepage
      Full disclosure: I work in the Developer Support group at eBay.

      There are two changes that are relevant for you. The first is the creation of the Community Codebase. All projects will be licensed under OSI acceptable licenses. Most of the current contents are under the MIT license. Free as in speech...

      The other major change is the removal of all fees from the Individual Tier and the increase in the call limits from 50/day to 10000/month. In other words, you can now register in the Developer Program at the Individual Tier and go live with your application without paying any fees at all. Free as in beer...

      Cheers,
      Bruce Thompson
      Staff DTS Engineer
      eBay Inc.
      • Just wondering

        1) You say "All projects will be licensed under OSI acceptable licenses."

        2) The OSI definition [opensource.org] says "The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale."

        3) The linked article states "The Community Codebase is free for all members of eBay's Developers Program and PayPal Developer Network."
        • Hi,

          While on the one hand there are no fees or royalties of any kind to join the eBay Developers Program at the individual Tier, it is necessary to join the program in order to be able to call the eBay APIs.

          I haven't checked, but I do not believe you need to be registered in the program in order to access the Community Codebase, nor to grab a copy of anything there. It's just that it won't necessarily be all that useful if you are not a member of the program as you will be unable to access our systems with

  • This is Good (Score:1, Insightful)

    by ehaggis ( 879721 )
    EBay is a respected player in the business world. They are seen as an ecommerce model that works. When a "real" company with "real" profits suddenly starts looking to the Open Source community, it validates the Open Source model to investors, capitalists, etc...

    The significance of this move is beyond EBay.

    • Re:This is Good (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Friday June 24, 2005 @08:50AM (#12900037)
      EBay is a respected player in the business world.

      Surely you must be joking. They use an e-commerce structure (Paypal) that acts as a bank, handles millions and millions of dollars like a bank, is structured exactly like a bank, but is *not FDIC-insured* and has the gall to block accounts at random without explanation or recourse.

      I don't really know what's respectful about using such a shaky financial tool to do business. I'm surprised they haven't been taken under by some huge class-action lawsuit, or by the feds who should damn well step in and force them to play by the book already.
    • EBay is a respected player in the business world.

      I wouldn't go that far. Sure, they're making profits hand over fist, but I'm not so sure "respected" is the word I'd use. They're still just one big flea market, with tons and tons of slimy characters.

    • "EBay is a respected player in the business world."

      That's true, if you completely reverse the statement. EBay and, if I may say so, their satanic 'child' PayPal are a few of the worst companies I've ever had the displeasure of doing business with.

      Starting with the illegitamate charge backs [slashdot.org] (PayPal) I've mentioned on Slashdot on my most recent post, poor customer service (PayPal & Ebay) in the form of not responding to emails, a nice little trick of charging for auctions that were canceled (eBay), ca

  • Misread (Score:3, Funny)

    by Poromenos1 ( 830658 ) on Friday June 24, 2005 @08:08AM (#12899617) Homepage
    Microsoft Corp.'s Excel spreadsheet software

    I read that as "Microsoft Corp.'s Excellent spreadsheet software". I thought the world was going to end or something.
    • Excel is an excellent spreadsheet (or at least it was the last time I used it, about 5 years ago). Imperfect, but really, really good. IMHO Excel '97 is still a better piece of software than any FOSS spreadsheet available for Linux.
    • Ideally, an opensource initiative would support OpenOffice or export OASIS-format data.....
  • While I applaud the small amount of legitimacy this may add to the open source community, it appears this may be just a way to make money off the open source community rather than truly help it. Open source is free and always will be (unless you count the s**tload of work that goes into it). On the other hand, this could also be used to help open source people make some money back for their invaluable efforts. The cynic in me thinks it's the former though, not the ladder. Only time will tell.
  • This seems to be a trend now. After Google (and I think Yahoo and Amazon), MSN will be now under pressure to go somehow the open source road. They will probably vehemently protest, try resist, twist things their own way and explain how open source is bad, but they can't go against the tide and ultimately one day or another they will follow.
    • Except Microsoft has already released code under open source licenses as part of their Shared Source Program [microsoft.com]

      For example: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix/ [sourceforge.net]
    • Hardly. Keep in mind that eBay and Google aren't participating in open source because of benevolence and overwhelming support for the model, it's because they derive benefit from it. While they are supporters of the open source model, it's in their best interest to show benevolence to the open source community because (1) they derive benefit from the model, and (2) it's a great marketing device. I have no qualms about saying that many down in the technical trenches in the open source community are being

  • Nice way of putting it (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Friday June 24, 2005 @08:11AM (#12899665)
    It allows individual developers and companies to access source code for various eBay and PayPal tools and applications.

    Or, phrasing it another way, it allows Ebaypal to take advantage of work done for them for free by someone else.
    • If there's a small bug in a piece of software I use I'd rather just patch it myself, if only for my personal use, than to wait for the company to patch it.
    • Or, phrasing it another way, it allows Ebaypal to take advantage of work done for them for free by someone else.

      Ooooh! Those dirty, rotten bastards! Let's hope word of this doesn't get around.

      After all, imagine what might happen if someone thought of doing the same thing with, oh, say, a computer operating system...

  • Someone needs to develop Ebay moderation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ChrisF79 ( 829953 ) on Friday June 24, 2005 @08:15AM (#12899702) Homepage
    Whenever I do a search on Ebay, I always find ridiculous auctions. Just do a search for a Powermac G5 and you'll see what I mean. There are inevitably those auctions with buy it now of $29 where they claim you'll get a system for free. Of course, I look past those but it would be nice if someone could write a moderation tool that would allow you to filter your results. Perhaps with ebay opening up their systems a bit, a crafty developer could go in and make changes such as this, which would markedly improve the ebay experience.
    • Ebay certainly doesn't make it intuitive to report suspicious/fraudulent auctions. I did a recent search for Canon 1ds Mark 1 cameras and I found one listed for about 2k under it's normal price. In looking at the seller's other items, I discovered about 60 high priced tech items ranging from miniDV camcorders to plasma monitors, all listed in lots of three and ending at the same time.

      Checking the seller's previous ebay activity, it contained only small purchases of seeds and gardening supplies and then l
      • That's a great point. And how easy would it be to tack on a little moderation box similar to slashdot where you could post your opinion on whether or not it was fraudulent. Then, you could limit your searches to ones where they aren't fraudulent. Of course, you'd have sellers modding down competitors items, but they could put in some sort of punishment control for that. I really haven't thought this all out, but I'm sure it is feasible and would really improve the system.
      • Even if you do manage to report fradulent auctions, it's not worth the time you spent. I chased one around for most of a Saturday a couple years ago and never got anything beyond automated responses from eBay's reporting system.
      • Like the parent to your post, I was doing lots of searches for Powermac G5s. I wrote a Perl script to search auctions matching a specific search, and put the results in an HTML page. In doing so, I found tons of auctions like you describe.

        Since the accounts have positive feedback, I came up with the theory that they are phished accounts. They have the same common indicators: expensive item, cheap price, email address in the body of the auction, and usually pre-approval is required to bid. Lots of times
    • One could certainly develop a tool that uses eBay Web Services to filter eBay search results in ways that are not supported out of the box. You could use the XML over HTTPS or SOAP APIs to do this, and we recently released a REST API that supports our search call (GetSearchResults). With the increased call limits and removal of the certification fee, writing such an application for your personal use (or to share with/sell to others) is now feasible.

      One application I want to write when I get some time -- ma
    • Really, all you would need to do is setup a search option that would let you apply a blacklist of sellers' names so that their auctions don't appear in your search results. That would solve all sorts of things.
  • Hmm I see this trend more and more within the open source comunity, A company "Opens its Source" to the world, but it only opens small pecies of what it does, and/or puts it under restrictive licences that essentially say you have no ownership of any modified code ergo the orginating company owns copyright to all versions of the code that are made.

    So what exactly IS the incentive to work on it, if all you are doing is ensuring that the company gets a better product, and that you have no legal right to im
  • Weird. The E-Bay source code appeared on TPB yesterday. Coincidence?
  • If they opensourced their auction code it might be something, but to open source just the search part o f it seems like it would barely benefit the developer and most certainly benefit ebay. Nothing wrong with that I guess, but I don't think the value is their for the developer.

    • Re:Nearly useless.. (Score:2, Informative)

      by DrLlama ( 213075 )
      Full disclosure: I work for eBay in the Developer Support group.

      I'm honestly not sure where the idea that we are open sourcing our search code came from. Let me quickly correct that: eBay is not open sourcing any of it's operational software.

      What we are doing is creating an open source repository for our SDKs and sample code for accessing the eBay systems. What other sort of projects get hosted on the Community Codebase remains to be seen, but the idea is that eBay engineers and third-party developers wil

  • gimics (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    IANAT, but i'm sorry, i am so sick of major corporation taking advantage of the "open source" hype simply for the benefit of their business.

    it helps them in two ways right off the bat:
    1. it's a marketing gimic, because the news gets spread (as here) and
    2. it garners them a better image immediately, because regardless of whether a single line of code gets written, they look good for being so magnanimous.

    and if it DOES get written, then you can add #3 to that list: free code for ___, inc.

    free software shou
  • Sure they just decided to do it. Not at all prompted by a rival [wsj.com] online [zdnet.co.uk] payment [cnn.com] system [yahoo.com] to their subsiduary company which doesn't have the best reputation [paypalsucks.com].

    Example quote:
    "Analysts on Monday said the biggest and most immediate risk to PayPal from a Google payment system would be a cap on growth in PayPal's off-eBay business, prompting a 2 percent drop in eBay shares."

    Hmmm, let's compare a vague promise to open 'parts' of search functionality (only to registered eBay and PayPal developers) to Google's Summer [slashdot.org]
    • Disclaimer: I run the evangelism group at eBay.

      I would love to be able to say that eBay or another other company of our size could launch a program as large as this so quickly, but we can't.

      I suggest you read Jeremy Zawodny's post on this subject [zawodny.com].

      We have about 100 web services API calls that let you interact with almost every part of the eBay platform. That's pretty open.

      As for free labor, we already have thousands of developers who are producing commercial applications. The sellers powered by these dev

  • doesn't sound "open source" to me (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cahiha ( 873942 ) on Friday June 24, 2005 @08:56AM (#12900085)
    The Community Codebase is free for all members of eBay's Developers Program and PayPal Developer Network

    If you have to be a member of some "developer program" or "developer network", then the code isn't open source. The term "Community Codebase" also suggests that it isn't open source, but that it is a program like Microsoft's "Shared Source" or Sun's "Community Source". Let's hope that eBay didn't mislabel a non-open source license as open source.

    Even if the eBay code turns out to be truly open source, it is still closely tied to eBay's service. On balance, it's still better if such code is open sourced, but the decision for eBay to open source a bit of client code is a completely different business decision than, say, IBM or Intel open sourcing a compiler.

    Companies like Sun, Microsoft, and (possibly) eBay seem to be trying hard to redefine the term open source for their own marketing purposes. Don't let them get away with it. A company that misapplies the term open source is being deceptive and should be condemned strongly.

    (I suppose it isn't surprising that someone like McVoy would go along with this sort of thing; he has, after all, been trying to take advantage of the open source community as well.)
    • Not to mention that even if they do release some of their code under an open-source license, it may still be encumbered by their massive patent portfolio, making the code useless for anyone else..

      Here's the translation I got from the article:

      "We don't feel like paying for more engineering talent, so we'll get free labor from the open source community to improve our code."

      • That depends on the open source license. If they distribute the software under the GPL or LGPL, they may implicitly be licensing all necessary patents along with the software. That's another reason why the GPL and LGPL are good for you.

  • Open code to query -their- database (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dysk ( 621566 ) on Friday June 24, 2005 @09:18AM (#12900340)
    They're open-sourcing tools to query their database. This isn't to give back to the open-source community, it's to get developers to write tools that encourage people to spend more money on eBay in a wider variety of contexts.

    There's nothing wrong with them opening their APIs and code to developers, in fact it may prove very useful. Still, it shouldn't be mistaken for a great act of charity on their part.

  • I think it's extremely ironic that they are doing this, especially when they don't allow the selling of custom Linux distros or legally burned Linux CDs.

    Of course this is probably just another way of "yet another company" to exploit the programming community for their gain. They'll suddenly slam it closed once they get what they want.

    Oh well.

    • I did find KANOTIX LINUX LiveCD 2005-03..Like Knoppix on Steroids! for sale on eBay.
      Makes me wonder what constitutes a "custom linux distro". Mine certainly is, but I don't sell it on eBay. I did list it on Half.com, but they closed all of their computer stuff. Frankly, I am a little more than hesitant about selling on eBay, due to the problems I see others having with them.
      Some of the eBay sellers tell you about that in their product pages, and it makes one wonder if eBay hasn't gone overboard to protect t

  • Yet more examples of companies trying to abuse the Open Source community, thinking that we're all just milling around in groups waiting for things to do and projects to contribute to.

    "Ho hum. When is a company going to come along and ask us to write their code for them. I'm bored."

    Sure, we'll get right on that... writing your code for you, for free, while you profit and make a business model out of it. Absolutely! Where do I sign up?

    Palm is trying it, Sun is trying it, Linksys tried it, and thou

    • Full Disclosure: I'm in the Developer Support group at eBay.

      Please believe me when I tell you that the last thing we want is for you to write our code for us. We're happy to take care of keeping the eBay systems running and evolving ourselves. :-)

      There is demand among the eBay user community for services that allow them to buy and sell more effectively on eBay. There is also demand among the user community for value added services related to their activities on eBay.

      The goal of the Community Codebase and
  • But I see some around here are still spreading that lie.

    And it doesn't help when Russ Nelson claims to have the "moral authority" on what is Open Source

    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=138002&cid=115 44316/ [slashdot.org]
  • That is a very interesting, because the _main_ eBay search guy, Louis Monier (also the guy behind AltaVista technology), just announced he is leaving eBay and going to Google:

    http://battellemedia.com/archives/001653.php [battellemedia.com]
  • IIRC, in order to access the "production" eBay servers with your third-party app, even through their published API's, you have to pay eBay hundreds of dollars to have someone "certify" your application. Anyone know if this policy is changing?
    • Short answer: No, you no longer have to pay. At our developer conference earlier this week we announced that there is no longer a fee to certify your application (which gives you access to the production systems).

      Alan Lewis
      Technical Evangelist
      eBay Developers Program
  • Back a year ago or so, I tried without success to create a desktop app that could run Ebay searches. However, it was a very expensive thing to do and I was doing it free as an academic project, so I had to go the route of HTML parsing and all that jazz.

    This is definitely a step in the right direction...
  • Strange this announcement should come after Google finally confirms [slashdot.org] the construction of their Wallet System. With all the hype built up around that project over the past few days, and the negative outlash towards Ebay during that time, its interesting they now announce their 'open source' release to the community.
  • Maybe I can stop buying GUIDs [ebay.com] with this new movement.

  • Would that be the same broken eBay Search that inexplicably alters the search string in some cases, that can't find items clearly up for auction, and that fails to find items clearly up for sale by a seller but that can't list them when pulling up all the auctions for the same seller's ID?

    Offering to open up that stuff strikes me like Saddam offering to open-source his blueprint for better government.

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