connecting*the*dots

We’re now a month away from the public launch of Krugle; a service that has positioned itself as the one-stop shop for developers to find open source code. If they can pull this off — provide an organized and retrievable library of structured code snippets — they’re bound to fast-track open source development, both within traditionally closed domains and innovative, freelance environments alike.

A snippet from Dylan Tweney’s Wired article:

Krugle, which launches officially next month, indexes programming code and documentation from open-source repositories like SourceForge and includes corporate sites for programmers like the Sun Developer Network. The index will cover around 100 million pages of what company founder Ken Krugler terms the “technical web” — high-quality technical pages for professional programmers. (By contrast, Google’s index covers about 11 billion pages.)

“This winds up being a window on all the open-source code in the world,” said Krugler, who estimates the Krugle index will contain between 3 and 5 terabytes of code by the time the engine launches in March.

The new service joins other source-code search engines like Koders and Codefetch, but Krugle intends to differentiate itself by allowing developers to annotate code and documentation, create bookmarks and save collections of search results in a tabbed workspace. Saved workspaces have unique URLs, so developers can send an entire collection of annotated code to a co-worker just by e-mailing a link.

Krugle also contains intelligence to help it parse code and to differentiate programming languages, so a PHP developer could search for a website-registration system written in PHP simply by typing “PHP registration system.”

If Krugle can be as intelligent as they claim, providing the capability to reduce gloms of source code into retrievable objects, not only by language, but by micro-functions as well, this could be the beginning of something huge.

The Contract And The Ammunition

No, I’m not talking about a professional hit. Well, kinda. Let me explain.

For the past three months, I’ve been volunteering part-time with the Participatory Culture Foundation, managing their Bounty County blog. In essence, I post submissions from organizations or funded individuals who are looking to pay individuals from the development community to complete specific open source bounty projects. I also cull the web for existing bounties, posting them within the Bounty County realm for one stop shopping.

One-stop shopping is becoming a theme in this post.

With the percept of open source evolving beyond the realm of specific code or pure ideology into an actual infrastructure for developers to find usable code and then smartly reshare structured, organized code snippets (Krugle), opportunities are beginning to reveal themselves; opportunities beyond just increased productivity within corporate or home offices.

Bounty County is a centralized location for developers to find open source bounties — a much more forward thinking concept than it’s current static execution. If Krugle can harness the energy of the open source development community, it only makes sense to develop a dynamic marketplace for sponsors to:

• post project bounties
• provide pointers to source material
• update project status

Well, I’ll be damned. That short list just happens to be the core features of the static Bounty County site.

Hey, Chris! Getting Nick and Ken together might not be a bad idea, no?