Koders.com — Open Source Developer’s Search Engine
The verticalization of search has been coming for some time with talk of all manner of specialized search engines that are either free or pay to play. The idea, of course, is to separate the wheat from the chaff and access tightly focused results instead of seeing ‘2,398,789 results for your search term’ (while arguments could be made for more advanced training on search methodology for the end user – that is an entirely different discussion).
In the meantime, Koders.com has launched a beta search engine targeting open source developers. The search engine indexes open source code spanning numerous licenses and languages. Some interesting functions:
- As you review results, you can select the project it belongs to and use a provided calculator in the browser to identify the cost to build (i.e. build versus buy). You can input the number of person months you would use, the percentage of functionality you need, and your monthly labor costs to evaluate.
- Koders has an enterprise tool coming soon that will allow larger enterprises to implement a server appliance with what looks to be index and search logic similar to the public search tool. The server can inventory all of the company’s source code, regardless of language (behind the firewall) and better enable code management, reuse utilization and licensing compliance/oversight.
An interview with Koder’s founder can be read at Newsforge. Reporter Joe Barr makes an interesting comment after the interview – should or will Koders offer some licensing guidance and clarification on usage of the code discovered during searches?
