Outercurve Technologies

About Outercurve Technologies

The Outercurve Foundation operated as a non-profit 501(c)(6) organization, established to serve as a bridge between corporations and the open-source software community. It was originally founded with financial backing from Microsoft on September 10, 2009, under the name the CodePlex Foundation. The initial goal was to facilitate the exchange of code and foster understanding between software companies and open-source developers.

In September 2010, the organization rebranded to the Outercurve Foundation to reduce public confusion and better differentiate itself from Microsoft's company-owned code hosting platform, CodePlex.com. This change underscored its independent mission to be on the leading edge of the open-source world, representing the interests of a growing number of corporate and independent developers engaging with the Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) community. Sam Ramji, formerly of Microsoft, served as the President of the Board of Directors, with Paula Hunter as the Executive Director.

The foundation's operational model was to act as an IP management and business operations service for FOSS projects. It provided legal infrastructure for companies to contribute code to the community by assigning the software copyright and intellectual property to the foundation. This structure allowed corporations like Microsoft and, later, AOL to transfer internal projects to a neutral, independent entity, simplifying the process of managing and encouraging community contributions. Outercurve was license-agnostic, meaning it supported any open-source license approved by the Open Source Initiative. Projects were organized into thematic "galleries," such as the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery, which housed notable projects like NuPack (now NuGet), and the Innovators Gallery, which included contributions like the Mayhem scripting system from Microsoft Research. The foundation officially filed for dissolution in April 2017.