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Reduce, reuse, recycle… repository
Matthew Aslett, June 27, 2008 @ 10:16 am ETDana Blankenhorn makes a good suggestion today responding to Jim Whitehurst’s call for more corporations to get involved in the open source development process and avoid software development wastage.
Dana would like to build a “Code Recycling Center” that would enable organizations to offload unwanted code and, presumably, pick up someone else’s unwanted code to create something new and exciting from. Admittedly, the code is unlikely to be mission critical, but then that’s why companies should be recycling it rather than developing their own. The legal and quality issues would need to be handled of course, but as Dana states:
“Corporate development staffs could unload their open source code, in whatever condition it may be in, secure in the knowledge the right home will be found for it. The Code Recycling Center would acknowledge the contribution and then go through the code, passing along what’s relevant to member projects, dumping the junk.”
It wouldn’t be easy of course, but then good ideas seldom are. One thing that is worth noting however is that projects like this, albeit under another name, are already up and running in some government circles.
Whilst on my tour of Europe I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of repository projects up and running across the continent to reuse code and reduce development costs and effort. Examples include Andalusia in Spain, the the Collaborative Development Environment in Italy, the Uitwisselplatform in The Netherlands, and Programverket in Sweden.
Meanwhile, the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) project, which will provide visibility into existing European open source projects where applications and code can be found and reused was launched just days ago.
OSOR will also encourage the reuse of publicly financed open source projects. Although it will at first host EC-funded projects, it will also be open to hosting projects created by individual governments and will promote the work of national repositories.
Examples like this are probably more likely than the single Code Recycling Center Dana envisages, but he is right in that the industry needs to encourage corporations, as well as governments, to get involved in these sort of initiatives.
Of course, when it comes to corporations, if it was considered a charitable donation, with the associated tax breaks, we might get somewhere. (See also Is social responsibility the key to corporate contributions?)
Comments (4) Categories: Software
Unfortunately, I’ve heard that in Andalucia’s case, a lot of code goes into the repository but no one ever uses it again. I believe it is due to the way the repository is organized. I’ve just heard this through the grapevine – I’m sure there are others that can cast a lot more light on this.
Interesting. I did get that impression from what I read about some of these projects. But I guess it is a start – better than it remaining behind locked doors.
Thanks for the timely post. I’m working on my LinuxWorld talk, which is about code recycling (aka code scavenging), so this is near and dear to my heart…reducing your carbon footprint, one line of reused code at a time.
But the issue of finding useful code is still a challenging one. Even after three years of work, we still don’t have a great way to search raw code for “something that does X”, where X is often a vaguely defined chunk of functionality. The best we can do currently is provide project-level metadata that can have this type of semantic information about the associated code, or hope that some super-studly programmer wrote really great comments about what their code does, versus how it works.
– Ken
PS – And now we what we need is a killer code recycling icon
[...] speech prompted Dana Blankenhorn to call for the development of a “Code Recycling Center”. I commented at the time that at a local level such projects are being created, at least at for governments, but [...]