With the objective of aiming at increased communication between open-source communities and software companies, the Redmond software giant Microsoft has launched CodePlex Foundation - a new, nonprofit open source organization which will be funded by Microsoft.

Noting that there is lack of adequate representation of commercial software companies and their employees in open source, Microsoft – which already has got approval for its Office Open XML as an official standard - said that the CodePlex Foundation would work with specific projects that would help bridge the gap between the open-source and commercial worlds.

The new organization’s acting president would be Sam Ramji, who would be quitting as Microsoft’s senior director of Platform Strategy. In addition, a number of other Microsoft employees would assume new responsibilities as members of the board and advisory panel of the foundation to which Microsoft has contributed $1 million.

At a conference call with the reporters, Ramji said that the new foundation would push open-source into the “mainstream.” Furthermore, going by the Codeplex Foundation Website, the organization intends addressing the full spectrum of software projects quite unlike the GNOME Foundation or the Mozilla Foundation.

A line from the foundation FAQ goes thus: “We wanted a foundation that addresses a full spectrum of software projects, and does so with the licensing and intellectual property needs of commercial software companies in mind.”