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Teamprise, the maker of a popular suite of applications for accessing Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server from within Eclipse and on Unix-based platforms, has announced that it is now offering free licenses for software developers who want to use the Teamprise Client Suite to access Microsofts open community site, CodePlex.
The move is significant in that it helps to link the Eclipse open-source development community with Microsofts fledgling open community project, observers said.
Teamprise is a suite of client applications for accessing Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 TFS from outside of the Visual Studio IDE (integrated development environment). It enables software development teams to use the source control, work item tracking, documents and reporting features of TFS from within the Eclipse IDE, and from other operating systems, including Linux and Mac OS X. Teamprise, based in Champaign, Ill., is a division of SourceGear.
“Why are we making this offer?” asked Martin Woodward, senior software developer at Teamprise. “It was a bit of a no-brainer really. Wed heard about some projects that wanted to move to CodePlex but couldnt because some of the developers were not running Windows. We have the necessary technology developed, so it would make sense to get it in the hands of as many people as possible. Also, Teamprise relies on many open-source projects to make a living—not least of which is the Eclipse project—so it seemed like the decent thing to do to offer complimentary licenses to Teamprise for anyone working on an open-source project.”
Ian Knox, group product manager for Visual Studio Team System at Microsoft, in a statement said, “Teamprise is a key strategic partner for Visual Studio Team System that works closely with our engineers to ensure that Team Foundation Server can be accessed from other development platforms. It is great to see Teamprise extend this added functionality to the community of developers using CodePlex for their open-source projects.”
“At CodePlex we want to support any open-source project regardless of their technology platforms,” said James Newkirk, product unit manager for CodePlex at Microsoft. “Developers can now use Teamprise to access CodePlex directly from the Eclipse IDE or from their Linux and Apple Macintosh computers. I am excited to see where the community takes this and what new projects will develop as a result.”
Added Woodward, from his blog: “Im excited to see who takes us up on this offer and which projects make CodePlex their new home. Its also good to see some choice in the open-source project hosting space. Personally, Im a fan of the way the CodePlex service works and love the fact that new features are coming out all the time from the team.”
CodePlex users wishing to request a complimentary license for Teamprise should visit the companys Web site for more details. CodePlex users will have access to the full set of features provided by the 2.1 release of Teamprise.
Woodward summed up the issue: “After talking with the CodePlex team we discovered that many open-source projects would like to use CodePlex as their home but were unable to because some of the developers were working on Linux or the Mac. We wanted to remove that restriction. Since CodePlex is based on the popular Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, we decided to provide developers of this open-source community access to the same tools we offer to the enterprise.”