For the longest time, eBay has been charging developers a fee to join there developer network. While the ability to offer eBay products or services in conjunction with their own websites or standalone programs, many programmers waived the opportunity because of the charge involved. PayPal, which was recently acquired by eBay, has been offering several different developer platforms for a couple of years now free of charge. eBay has apparently seen the light and has announced they will begin offering their development tools at no charge as well.

While developers can sign up for the company's Developers Program, the actual functionality of the new "unified schema" won't go in effect until January 1st of next year. According to Greg Isaacs, the Director of the eBay Developer's Program, "..developers using the unified schema will also receive free API calls, while members using the legacy schema will continue to pay at their existing rates." This is good news for those who already have applications that interact with eBay at the moment and will allow them to migrate to the new schema in their own time to avoid the fees.

Isaacs continues, "This should remove a major barrier for any software developers who are interested in innovating and growing businesses on the eBay Platform, but are unsure about the costs. This change will allow developers to explore new business models as they create solutions to enhance the experience of buyers and sellers on eBay."

You'll probably see a host of new products and maybe even websites that will interact with eBay, bidding and selling, auctions, eBay stores and who knows what else is in the future. To find out more, simply visit the eBay Developers website.

About The Author:

Dan Robins is the webmaster of CRNH.COM Computer Reviews News and Hardware, an online RSS news aggregator that offers thousand of computer related news stories.