SourceXchange Closes Down Due to Lack of Interest

By Michael Hall,
LinuxToday

After nearly two years of operation, Open Source work-for-hire
site SourceXchange is
closing its doors according to a mail sent out by site founder
Brian Behlendorf, founder and CTO of CollabNet, which hosted the site. A
message on the site’s home page now directs users to SourceCast,
CollabNet’s collaborative software development package.

SourceXchange was introduced in May of 1999 as an affiliate of
O’Reilly & Associates, and was created in conjunction with
Hewlett Packard. One of the goals of the site was to link
corporations interested in the benefits of Open Source development
practices with developers willing to produce the code for them for
pay. A series of “Request for Proposals” (RFP’s) were seeded by
Hewlett Packard, and the site was formally launched in December of
1999 as a CollabNet production. An early success the
site reported was a test suite for the Apache web server, done
at the behest of HP for a cost of $5000. During its first months of
operation, the site claimed over 1500 participating developers, and
claimed credit for facilitating over a dozen Open Source
development projects.

The site was, in many ways, reflective of the approach CollabNet
has since taken with its SourceCast product, providing a formalized
and business-oriented approach to Open Source development centered
on building developer communities where they may not have grown
spontaneously, and facilitating the Open Source development
process. Where, for instance “peer review” has been cited as a
strength of the Open Source model, SourceXchange appointed “Peer
Reviewers,” to provide guidance to developers and companies working
on projects. The site also eventually provided a “wish list” where
developers interested in working on a given project could pitch the
idea to gain corporate sponsorship for their work.

One of the last major news items out of the site came last
August, when OpenSales (now known as Zelerate) released its
AllCommerce Web site product-retailing software as open source,
offering to pay developers to work on the software via the
SourceXchange site.

Since then, CollabNet has tallieed a series of sites built
around its SourceCast software including MozDev.org, OpenOffice.org, and the Indrema Developer Network.

Behlendorf’s message, also appearing on the SourceXchange
site:

From brian@collab.net Thu Apr  5 13:32:42 2001
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 10:44:17 -0700 (PDT)
From: Brian Behlendorf 
To: developer-announce@lists.sourcexchange.com
Subject: SourceXchange News
 
 
As of March, 2001, SourceXchange has officially closed its virtual doors.
While a unique idea and one that we feel really adhered more closely to
the Open Source ideal than any other work-for-hire site ever did, it
simply did not achieve the volume of business necessary to maintain the
site and evolve the offering to meet the needs of sponsors and developers.
 
Thank you to the hundreds of participants on our various projects,
and to the sponsors who were willing to take a risk on a new model (and
who, by and large, got good results).  CollabNet is now focusing its full
attention on its collaborative software development product called
SourceCast.
 
Happy Hacking!
 
        Brian