Net hopes to cement a place for Web-based community software development among commercial software vendors. Net builds and hosts development exchanges for customers that use open-source models. It offers services such as source versioning, source browsing and maintenance of developer contact lists.
Developers just have to sign up to get free access.
Oracle officials said they want to foster a resource community for Oracle developers and might consider outsourcing some software development projects if the exchange proves successful. Stacey Quandt, an analyst at Giga Information Group Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said an abundance of application development projects, coupled with a severe shortage of developers, was the driving force behind Collab. Net's Oracle and Sun projects. Oracle is not opening up the source code for Oracle8i, but by releasing some source code, it hopes to create a community, albeit a walled one, around application developers. To give its fledgling StarOffice productivity suite a boost, Sun said it plans to release the source code for the desktop application suite via Collab.