GForge

Infobox Software
name = GForge Open Source Edition
developer = GForge Group
operating_system = Linux Unix
genre = Collaborative development environment
license = GNU GPL
website = [http://www.gforge.org gforge.org]

GForge is a free software fork of the web-based project-management and collaboration software originally created for SourceForge. GForge is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

GForge provides project hosting, version control (CVS and Subversion), bug-tracking, and messaging.

History and the split

In 1999, VA Linux hired four developers, including Tim Perdue, to develop the SourceForge.net service to encourage Open Source development and support the Open Source developer community. SourceForge.net services were offered free of charge to any Open Source project team. Following the SourceForge launch [cite web
url=http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/17/1445253
title=Slashdot: SourceForge Goes Public Beta] on November 17, 1999, the free software community rapidly took advantage of SourceForge.net, and traffic and users grew very quickly.

As another competitive web service called 'Server 51' was being readied for launch, VA Linux released the sourcecode for the sourceforge.net web site on January 14, 2000 [cite web
url=http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/01/14/1223213
title=Slashdot: SourceForge Code Release
date=2000-01-14] as a marketing ploy to show that SourceForge was 'more open source'. Many companies began installing and using it themselves and contacting VA Linux for professional services to set up and use the software. However, their pricing was so unrealistic, they had few customers. To try to force some of the large companies to purchase licenses, they decided to close the source code tree when their Linux hardware business collapsed in the dotcom bust. They renamed the company VA Software and called the closed codebase "SourceForge Enterprise Edition". This prompted objections from open source community members. [cite web
url=http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/05/09/0853201
title=Slashdot: SourceForge Fails To Forge Source?
date=2000-05-09] VA Software continued to say that a new source code release would be made at some point, but it never was.

Some time later, Tim Perdue left VA, started GForge open source project based on the last publicly released version, 2.6, and merged the debian-sf fork, which had been maintained all along by Roland Mas and Christian Bayle into the project.

GForge Advanced Server

A new version of GForge dubbed GForge Advanced Server (GForge AS for short) was rewritten from scratch based on newer UML concepts. It saw first public release on June 21, 2006. Unlike the previous versions of GForge, this one is not open source although it can be used freely (with some restrictions on project limits). GForge AS is also written in PHP but encrypted with ionCube to prevent people from reading the source code. It continues to use PostgreSQL as the database engine with optional Oracle and MySQL support. Plug-ins for Eclipse IDE as well as Microsoft Visual Studio and other related tools were added to increase developer functionality. Workflow process management to handle making use of the full software life cycle from inception, bug tracking to new release enhancement citation.

Installations

*Alioth - for Debian-related software and documentation
* [http://gforge.uwc.ac.za AVOIR Forge] - for the [http://avoir.uwc.ac.za/ African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources] project.
* [http://cakeforge.org CakeForge] - for the CakePHP community.
* [http://gforge.org/ GForge.org] - the self-hosting website of the GForge project.
* [http://helixcommunity.org The Helix Community] - for Helix-related projects.
* [http://joomlacode.org JoomlaCode.org] - for Joomla!-related projects.
* [http://luaforge.net LuaForge] - for the Lua-related projects.
* [http://forge.ocamlcore.org OCaml Forge] - for OCaml-related projects
* [http://www.osp.ir OSP] - for open source software projects.
* [http://pgfoundry.org PgFoundry] - for PostgreSQL-related projects.
* [http://rubyforge.org RubyForge] - for the Ruby community.

ee also

*Computer-aided software engineering (CASE)
*Computer-supported collaboration
*GNU Savannah
*List of Rapid Application Development tools
*Toolkits for User Innovation

External links

* [http://gforge.org GForge official website]
* [http://gforge.org/projects/gforge/ GForge project open source page]
* [http://gforgegroup.com/es/ GForge Advanced Server page]

References