eBay Seeks Open Source Allies Against Google

As the open source community grows, more and more companies call upon its services to develop applications for their software or web sites, and eBay's latest initiative comes to prove this trend.

Perhaps a bit alarmed by Google's latest move, that of going into the online payments business, eBay has decided to launch a new website for open source developers, with the purpose of helping them develop certain applications for the auctions site and its online payments service, PayPal.

The site, called eBay Community Codebase, will grant access to the source codes of different eBay and PayPal tools as well as certain application samples, but will also try to facilitate the developers' collaboration on different projects. Initially, the projects available on the site will contain the models of some applications which allow people to keep track of the state of auctions, as well as the scripts for integrating PayPal's "buy now" buttons into websites.

Community Codebase will be hosted by CollabNet, which will assure an environment that allows developers from different areas and time zones to work together.

It remains to be seen whether this move will help PayPal maintain its supremacy, at least for a while, considering the fact that financial analysts predict a substantial loss of revenue following the appearance of a player the size of Google on the online payments market.