Microsoft to move Orchard open-source CMS project to the CodePlex Foundation
Microsoft is moving its "Orchard" open-source content-management-system (CMS) project from its own CodePlex repository to the recently formed CodePlex Foundation on December 9.
Orchard is the successor to Microsoft's first pass at developing an open-source CMS, which was known by the codename "Oxite." Microsoft released specs and some of the Orchard source to interested developers in November.
I received the following statement from a CodePlex Foundation spokesperson on the evening of December 8:
"Tomorrow (December 9) we will accept the contribution of the Orchard project from Microsoft, which you will see reflected on our home page and in the ASP.NET Gallery."
The CodePlex Foundation -- a non-profit group founded and funded by Microsoft in September -- with the mission to "bring open source and commercial software developers together in a place where they can collaborate." Former Softie Sam Ramji is the interim director of the CodePlex Foundation.
Microsoft is "donating" Orchard to the Foundation with a commitment for three years of support. The dedicated project team, comprised of a handful of Microsoft employees, is being assigned full-time to the Foundation for that period. (Now the Orchard team's initial claim that Orchard "was not a Microsoft project" makes more sense...)
Neither Microsoft nor the Foundation has talked about release targets for Orchard. A CodePlex Foundation spokesperson, whom I asked last night, said, "The (Orchard) code is very early (and the project will come in officially tomorrow) so there is no beta/availability date set." But the Foundation is saying that the final code will definitely be relealsed under the OSI-approved New BSD license.
The CodePlex Foundation is slated to post its acceptance of the Orchard project at 9:00 am PT on the CodePlex Foundation web site.
The CodePlex Foundation announced in November its acceptance of its first project, the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery, into the ASP.NET Ajax Library Project. The ASP.NET Ajax Library consolidates ASP.NET Ajax and the Ajax Control Toolkit into a single open source project.