Jul
28
Written by:
Paula Hunter
7/28/2010 1:26 PM
MVC Contrib is the first project donated to the CodePlex Foundation by an independent group of developers backed by an independent software development company. MVC Contrib, an open source community project led by Eric Hexter and Jeffrey Palermo of Headspring, was named the CodePlex Foundation project as part of the CodePlex Foundation’s ASP.NET open source gallery in February. Headspring, founded in 2001, is a custom software development and consulting firm based in Austin, Texas. The following interview about the MVC Contrib project is with Eric Hexter, now with Dell Computer but still co-leading the project.
CodePlex Foundation: Eric, tell us what motivated you and Jeffrey to launch the MVC Contrib project in the first place.
Eric: Well, if I think back, we had attended some of the initial design reviews of the MVC Contrib framework. One of the biggest stories about the framework was that it was going to be extensible and open and it would stay out of your way, which in the previous versions of ASP.NET framework, that wasn’t always true. So that being the case, we saw it just as a natural project that needed to exist. Just coming out of the box, initially, there were a lot of missing pieces, so the Contrib project and the fact that the ASP.NET MVC framework was so extensible, it made sense to make it a Contrib project; a community project that the community could start developing extensions and maybe alternative implementations of certain features. So the idea was we wanted to start something and get some community support around some of the developing and sharing some ways to develop on the framework.
CodePlex Foundation: When did you launch the project?
Eric: The project launched in 2007, literally the day after the first community technology preview of the MVC framework.
CodePlex Foundation: Since that time, how has it grown in terms of contributions of people and in overall involvement?
Eric: It’s actually been great. I can’t even count how many contributors we’ve had on the project. It’s been literally dozens and dozens of people from almost every country and every continent. We’ve had a lot of different people contributing code, other people very active on the mailing list in reporting variations of implementations. We’ve had some small contributions of, say, bug fixes and other large contributions. A lot of the things that Headspring has donated have been just large features, so it has kind of been across the board; just good community involvement.
CodePlex Foundation: So what compelled you and Jeffrey to contribute MVC Contrib to the CodePlex Foundation?
Eric: Well, Jeffrey and I both attended the Monospace event in Austin, Texas. It was in the fall of ’09. We’d heard a lot about the CodePlex Foundation. Some of the board members and directors were there at the Monospace event and we talked with them and it just seemed like it would make sense as far as being part of the Foundation. There is a lot of code from a lot of different people who were contributing to the project. We didn’t want MVC Contrib to be, say, one of those projects that maybe a company would be afraid to adopt because they were unsure of the license or what entity was behind the project. So having something like a foundation being behind the project just made a lot of sense, hopefully from our point of view, from the adoption of companies wanting to use it.
CodePlex Foundation: So your feeling, or belief, was that the CodePlex Foundation would help align you with companies and people who might be able to benefit from the project and also contribute more to it.
Eric : Absolutely. One of the side benefits that we received was that soon after we were part of the CodePlex Foundation, Microsoft actually donated a feature and there’s a developer, David Ebbo, who is now a contributor. He’s a full-time employee of Microsoft but he’s also enhancing one of the features that they donated. It’s called T4 MVC. I think he’s an architect on the ASP.NET team, so it’s great to have somebody with knowledge of the framework and things that we can fit – we can bounce questions off him of certain inner workings, so it’s great to have kind of an open channel as well. So that was one of the side benefits we hadn’t planned on. It certainly worked out great to have somebody from Microsoft as a contributor to the project as well.
CodePlex Foundation: Were there other benefits from the relationship with the CodePlex Foundation that you didn’t anticipate but that you welcomed after you discovered them?
Eric: I’d say probably the first thing was really understanding our license that we had selected, as well as just cleaning up our source code repository, making sure that we were contributing licenses. A large portion of the code in our project was original but some was pulled from other projects. We are using the third-party dependencies and a portion of the work of getting into the Foundation was going through and documenting everything properly and cleaning our source code, so that was one of the benefits. At first it just wasn’t clear that we’d be doing that work, but it definitely helped me out because I’m a code guy and not necessarily somebody who understands the licensing all that clearly.
CodePlex Foundation: The licensing piece of the puzzle is something that the CodePlex Foundation offers guidance and support in. Do you think that’s common among developers to maybe not be so cognizant of the licensing and to be more passionate about the code-making?
Eric: Yes, absolutely. I mean I’ve run into a few people who really understand the intricacies of the licenses, but nine times out of ten, most developers really don’t understand what the different ramifications of open source licenses are and what that means more towards adoption than anything else. Certain companies are more hesitant to adopt certain licenses because there are misconceptions among their legal departments, so it’s definitely an area of expertise that I was looking for guidance from the Foundation from and they certainly provided it.
CodePlex Foundation: Since the project was contributed to the CodePlex Foundation in February, what have you seen in terms of MVC Contrib contributions, the amount of involvement? Has it changed at all based on the relationship and based on this contribution?
Eric: I’d say the one area that has increased specifically because of the Foundation has been with one of the members of the Microsoft ASP.NET team being allowed to contribute. Before that, we weren’t allowed to take, or I guess the people in the ASP.NET team weren’t allowed to contribute, but they specifically allowed one person, gave him rights to donate, I guess, some of his time to work on the features. That’s been good. Other than that, we’ve always been a strong community project so I can’t say we’ve got more contributions, but we have cleaned up our process to better document and better recognize contributors.
CodePlex Foundation: Right. So adding a little bit of organizational kind of a foundation or organizational infrastructure to the whole project has been helpful.
Eric: Yes, absolutely.
CodePlex Foundation: So Eric, what about in the days and weeks ahead? What’s coming up with MVC Contrib and the CodePlex Foundation?
Eric: Well, one of the things that we’ve been looking at is a way to encourage more contributions and maybe ways that are not code-based. So we’ve been looking at some other projects like Ruby on Rails and other successful open source projects. One of the things that they have been doing, and we think it’s successful, is they’ve offered sort of cash bounties or licenses to give away for certain areas that the project needs. Most of those areas are around documentation and help guides to help out newer people who are trying to use the project to kind of get started, get going fast, get going quickly. So we’ve actually been working with the CodePlex Foundation to set up, let’s say, a bank account and some of the mechanisms to help support the financial aspect. So that’s one of the areas that any of the individual contributors on the project or the co-founders - we didn’t really want to take on the responsibility and headache of dealing with taxes and keeping track of money and all that stuff,
CodePlex Foundation: All that fun stuff.
Eric: Yes, exactly. So we worked with the Foundation to set up a bank account that the Foundation will manage. We’ll just set up the processes for how do we rewards - a bounty if somebody’s created a getting started guide or a guide around one of these features. We’ve been working through those details and I’m very excited at how open the Foundation was. They just really understood what we wanted to do and why an individual on the project didn’t necessarily want to set it up, but it made perfect sense for the Foundation to really own the majority of itself. That’s one of the things that we have coming up that I’ve been personally very excited to get going.
CodePlex Foundation: That’s excellent. That’s an interesting model for really lowering the barriers, the options, and the entries of people by making it more accessible for them through this bounty program. That’s pretty cool.
Eric: Yes, it’s been one of those things where I know people want to contribute. Sometimes documentation isn’t the thing that motivates them, but if they could maybe get a small prize and maybe buy themselves something that they’d enjoy out of it - it’s a win-win all the way around.
CodePlex Foundation: That’s cool. How do people find out how to get involved with that initiative?
Eric: Once we’re ready to start taking bounties as well as start producing content, I was going to put it up on the project homepage which is MVCcontrib.org. Until then we’re still handling some of the details or email, just getting everything set up.