SourceForge Enterprise Edition

Last updated
SourceForge
Developer(s) CollabNet
Stable release
4.4
Available inEnglish
Type Revision control, software development management system and bug tracking system
License Proprietary
Website CollabNet TeamForge

SourceForge Enterprise Edition was a proprietary collaborative version control and software development forge management system.

A component of software configuration management, version control, also known as revision control or source control, is the management of changes to documents, computer programs, large web sites, and other collections of information. Changes are usually identified by a number or letter code, termed the "revision number", "revision level", or simply "revision". For example, an initial set of files is "revision 1". When the first change is made, the resulting set is "revision 2", and so on. Each revision is associated with a timestamp and the person making the change. Revisions can be compared, restored, and with some types of files, merged.

Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development is a process of writing and maintaining the source code, but in a broader sense, it includes all that is involved between the conception of the desired software through to the final manifestation of the software, sometimes in a planned and structured process. Therefore, software development may include research, new development, prototyping, modification, reuse, re-engineering, maintenance, or any other activities that result in software products.

In FOSS development communities, a forge is a web-based collaborative software platform for both developing and sharing computer applications. A forge platform is generally able to host multiple independent projects.

Contents

Background

SourceForge provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of free software / open source software applications (such as PostgreSQL and Subversion).

Free software software licensed to preserve user freedoms

Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price: users—individually or in cooperation with computer programmers—are free to do what they want with their copies of a free software regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program. Computer programs are deemed free if they give users ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.

PostgreSQL Free and open-source relational database management system

PostgreSQL, also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and technical standards compliance. It is designed to handle a range of workloads, from single machines to data warehouses or Web services with many concurrent users. It is the default database for macOS Server, and is also available for Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Windows.

Its predecessor, SourceForge, started as open source software, but a version of it (based on the v2.5 prototype code) was eventually relicensed under a proprietary software license as SourceForge Enterprise Edition, which was re-written in Java [1] [2] and marketed for offshore outsourcing software development. [3]

Software relicensing is applied in open-source software development when software licenses of software modules are incompatible and are required to be compatible for a greater combined work. Licenses applied to software as copyrightable works, in source code as binary form, can contain contradictory clauses. These requirements can make it impossible to combine source code or content of several software works to create a new combined one.

Java (programming language) Object-oriented programming language

Java is a general-purpose programming language that is class-based, object-oriented, and designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is intended to let application developers write once, run anywhere (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of the underlying computer architecture. The syntax of Java is similar to C and C++, but it has fewer low-level facilities than either of them. As of 2019, Java was one of the most popular programming languages in use according to GitHub, particularly for client-server web applications, with a reported 9 million developers.

The original codebase of SourceForge (code-named "Alexandria") [4] was forked by the GNU Project as GNU Savannah; then, Savannah was also modified at CERN and released as Savane. SourceForge was also later forked as GForge by one of the SourceForge programmers, and then GForge was itself forked as FusionForge by three GForge developers.

In software engineering, a project fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of software. The term often implies not merely a development branch, but also a split in the developer community, a form of schism.

GNU Project Free software project

The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project that Richard Stallman announced on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices by collaboratively developing and publishing software that gives everyone the rights to freely to run the software, copy and distribute it, study it, and modify it. GNU software grants these rights in its license.

GNU Savannah Software forge, website, and associated engine

GNU Savannah is a project of the Free Software Foundation initiated by Loïc Dachary, which serves as a collaborative software development management system for free Software projects. Savannah currently offers CVS, GNU arch, Subversion, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, mailing list, web hosting, file hosting, and bug tracking services. Savannah initially ran on the same SourceForge software that at the time was used to run the SourceForge portal.

Originally sold by VA Software, SourceForge Enterprise Edition was acquired by CollabNet on April 24, 2007. [5] CollabNet subsequently integrated SourceForge Enterprise Edition with its own CollabNet Enterprise Edition and product, taking architectural and product elements from both systems, and re-launched the enhanced product as TeamForge in 2008. Since 2007, TeamForge has continued to undergo development, adding in a series of application lifecycle management tools.

CollabNet VersionOne is a software firm headquartered in Alpharetta, GA. CollabNet VersionOne products and services belong to the industry categories of value stream management, devops, agile management, application lifecycle management (ALM), and enterprise version control. These products are used by companies and government organizations to reduce the time it takes to create and release software.

Application lifecycle management (ALM) is the product lifecycle management of computer programs. It encompasses requirements management, software architecture, computer programming, software testing, software maintenance, change management, continuous integration, project management, and release management.

SourceForge.net was initially powered by SourceForge but, since 2009, it runs on the software that eventually became Apache Allura.

Apache Allura is an open-source forge software for managing source code repositories, bug reports, discussions, wiki pages, blogs and more for any number of individual projects. Allura graduated from incubation with the Apache Software Foundation in March 2013.

See also

Related Research Articles

SourceForge Web-based source code repository

SourceForge is a web-based service that offers software developers a centralized online location to control and manage free and open-source software projects. It provides a source code repository, bug tracking, mirroring of downloads for load balancing, a wiki for documentation, developer and user mailing lists, user-support forums, user-written reviews and ratings, a news bulletin, micro-blog for publishing project updates, and other features.

Free and open-source software software whose source code is available and which is permissively licensed

Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that can be classified as both free software and open-source software. That is, anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source code is openly shared so that people are encouraged to voluntarily improve the design of the software. This is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright licensing and the source code is usually hidden from the users.

GForge

GForge is a commercial fork of the web-based project management and collaboration software originally created under the GPL for SourceForge, called Savane. GForge is currently a product managed by the GForge Group, Inc and provides project hosting, version control, code reviews, ticketing, release management, continuous integration and messaging.

A source-code repository is a file archive and web hosting facility for source code of software, documentation, web pages, and other works, accessible either publicly or privately. They are often used by open-source software projects and other multi-developer projects to maintain revision and version history, or version control. Many repositories provide a bug tracking system, and offer release management, mailing lists, and wiki-based project documentation. Software authors generally retain their copyright when software is posted to a code hosting facilities.

Tigris.org is an open source software development community. It hosts software development services such as web hosting, mailing lists, issue tracking, wiki, download, and revision control with Subversion or Concurrent Versions System (CVS). It is hosted by CollabNet, the initiators and stewards of Subversion, and runs CollabNet Enterprise Edition. Portions of the Subversion project itself are hosted on Tigris. Tigris competes with the better-known SourceForge, although it is primarily focused on projects for collaborative software development.

GNU IceCat Firefox derivative recommending only free software

GNU IceCat, formerly known as GNU IceWeasel, is a free software rebranding of the Mozilla Firefox web browser distributed by the GNU Project. It is compatible with GNU/Linux, Windows, Android and macOS.

IcedTea is a build and integration project for OpenJDK launched by Red Hat in June 2007. IcedTea-Web is a free software implementation of Java Web Start and the Java web browser plugin. IcedTea-Sound is a collection of plugins for the Java sound subsystem, including the PulseAudio provider which used to be included with IcedTea. The Free Software Foundation recommends that all Java programmers use IcedTea as their development environment.

Geeknet, Inc. is a Fairfax County, Virginia–based company that owns the online retailer ThinkGeek and is a subsidiary of GameStop. The company was formerly known as VA Research, VA Linux Systems, VA Software, and SourceForge, Inc.. It was founded in 1993 and was formerly headquartered in Mountain View, California.

Companies whose business center on the development of open-source software employ a variety of business models to solve the challenge of how to make money providing software that is by definition licensed free of charge. Each of these business strategies rests on the premise that users of open-source technologies are willing to purchase additional software features under proprietary licenses, or purchase other services or elements of value that complement the open-source software that is core to the business. This additional value can be, but not limited to, enterprise-grade features and up-time guarantees to satisfy business or compliance requirements, performance and efficiency gains by features not yet available in the open source version, legal protection, or professional support/training/consulting that are typical of proprietary software applications.

The OpenH323 project had as its goal the development of a full featured, open source (MPL) implementation of the H.323 Voice over IP protocol. The code was written in C++ and, through the development effort of numerous people around the world, supported a broad subset of the H.323 protocol. The software has since been integrated into a number of open source and commercial software products.

CloudForge is a software-as-a-service product for application development tools and services, such as Git hosting, Subversion (SVN) hosting, issue trackers and Application Lifecycle Management. CloudForge was built on CollabNet’s cloud hosting and integration platform, acquired from Codesion.com in October 2010.

JetBrains Czech software company

JetBrains s.r.o. is a software development company whose tools are targeted towards software developers and project managers.

Savane is a free web-based software hosting system. It includes issue tracking, project member management by roles and individual account maintenance. This project is no longer developed.

Tuleap is an application lifecycle management system, which facilitates agile software development, design projects, V-model, Requirement Management, and IT Services Management. It is free software released under the GNU General Public License, version 2. Tuleap is an enterprise alternative solution to proprietary tools like CollabNet, Jira and Confluence, Crucible. The software was developed by Enalean, a company founded in 2011 and headquartered in France.

References

  1. ↑ Rick Moen. "Sourceforge forks" . Retrieved 2017-02-11. ...around 2002, VA Software decided to junk the entire SourceForge codebase ... as the basis for its proprietary SourceForge Enterprise product, and recode the entire thing from scratch in Java...
  2. ↑ VA Software. "Differences Between SourceForge.net® and SourceForge® Enterprise Edition". Archived from the original on 2007-03-10. Retrieved 2017-02-11. SourceForge.net was built ... using popular web scripting languages including PHP, Perl and Python and many Open Source tools and components. ... By contrast, SourceForge Enterprise Edition was designed and built from the ground up ... [with a] Platform-independent J2EE architecture
  3. ↑ Business Wire (2003-12-08). "Latest Product from VA Software Provides Better Governance for Offshore Outsourcing" . Retrieved 2017-02-11. VA Software Corporation (Nasdaq:LNUX), provider of SourceForge Enterprise Edition ... today announced the release of a product designed to address key challenges related to offshore application development. SourceForge Enterprise Edition 3.5...
  4. ↑ "SourceForge Alexandria". Archived from the original on 2002-03-02. Retrieved 2017-02-11.
  5. ↑ Darryl K. Taft (2007-04-24). "CollabNet Acquires SourceForge" . Retrieved 2013-03-20.
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