Many of you will, by now, have heard about the formation of the CodePlex Foundation. In order to give you an in-depth look into the thinking behind Microsoft sponsoring the Foundation, I talked to Bill Staples, the General Manager for the Web Platform and Tools Team at Microsoft, a member of the interim CodePlex Foundation board and whose engineering team builds the Microsoft Web platforms.

"Before we dig into the details of the CodePlex Foundation, it is important to note that the Foundation is completely independent from Microsoft. The Foundation's mission to help the exchange of code and understanding between software companies and open source communities is really interesting to Microsoft. To help the Foundation fund its first year of operations, Microsoft is donating U.S. $1 million," Staples told me.

One thing that Staples was very clear about during our conversation was that the CodePlex Foundation will be complementary to the software ecosystem and is not designed to compete with any of the existing open source foundations. He hopes that the CodePlex Foundation will bring commercial and open source software development communities even closer.

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