eBay has begun providing open source code for some of its search and access applications, aiming to expand its external developer community.

The software will be available under a new programme called Community Codebase, which was announced at the eBay Developers Conference in San Jose, California, on Tuesday.

With just over 20% of the listed items on eBay coming in through applications and tools provided by external developers, the auction giant is hoping to encourage developers to find new ways of using the online marketplace.

“We have seen lots of great examples of open source applications, clearly; Linux, Apache and Firefox just to name a few. We wanted to really tap that mindshare and that creativity on a global basis. And so, having a really big push with open source is the way to do that,” says Greg Isaacs, director of eBay’’s developer programme.

The Community Codebase is free for all members of eBay’’s Developers Programme and PayPal Developer Network. (Pay Pal is owned by eBay.) It allows individual developers and companies to access source code for various eBay and PayPal tools and applications.

An example is a Java application that allows TiVo users to search and bid on items via their digital video recorder boxes. Other examples include a Firefox toolbar, various Pay Pal toolkits, and an application used to extract information from Pay Pal’’s database and putting it into Microsoft’’s Excel spreadsheet software.

eBay created its first programme for developers in 2000 and has 15 000 registered members today. Managing the community is done partly with software from CollabNet, which gives the developers, and eBay, tools for revision control, issue tracking and discussion forums.

Even though Isaacs stressed that the open source approach was an ”easy decision to make,” courting the open source community can sometimes prove difficult. “It is not like open source is bad or good. It depends on what you are trying to accomplish. eBay does not make its money off source code, it makes its money out of the whole package,” says Larry McVoy, CEO of South San Francisco-based BitMover, which has been involved in the Linux kernel development.

BitMover, however, does make money off its source code, and McVoy plans to change his company’’s open source approach next month because of a licensing dispute with Samba developer, Andrew Tridgell.

After years of allowing open source developers to use his BitKeeper source code management system free of charge, BitMover will next month begin charging them for the right to use its software. Still, McVoy thinks eBay’’s move makes sense because it has an alternative form of generating revenue.

“There is probably significant advantage for eBay in terms of opening it [the eBay applications source code] up, getting more people using it, more people working with eBay. Anything that draws more eyeballs to eBay is good for eBay,” he adds.

With the Community Codebase programme, eBay also follows in the footsteps of competitors such as Amazon and Google by giving away access to the content in its database. Individual members will now have access to 10 000 database calls per month.

For companies, accessing the database ranges from a flat fee of $100 up to whatever is negotiated. In the first quarter of 2005, eBay supported approximately 1,7bn monthly requests through external applications, which made up 42% of all calls to the eBay database.