eBay introduced an online forum for open-source developer collaboration. The eBay Community Codebase, free to all third-party developers enrolled in the eBay and PayPal Developers Program, allows them to access source code for various eBay and PayPal tools and sample applications, and collaborate on new projects and innovations.

The announcement kicks off eBay's Developer Conference in San Jose, running June 21-22. eBay CEO Meg Whitman is scheduled to give a keynote presentation to developers Tuesday morning.

eBay's press announcement said the eBay Community Codebase is part of an effort to foster innovation and help developers more quickly and easily build applications using the eBay and PayPal Web services platforms.

But the move is designed more for individual programmers who want to tinker with eBay applications and does not affect eBay's certified solutions providers in how they manage their commercial applications.

eBay changed its pricing for individual-tier program members, waiving certification fees giving them access to 10,000 free Application Programming Interface (API) calls per month, up from approximately 1500 per month. Codebase gives individual programmers the ability to collaborate together on projects.

Independent programmers have been tinkering with Google. Dr.Paul Rademacher developed a housing map application (http://www.housingmaps.com), which takes real estate listings from Craigslist and overlays them on Google Maps.

It will be interesting to see if eBay can cede control necessary to foster such innovation, however.

http://www.codebase.ebay.com