Developer(s) GForge Group License Proprietary | Development status Active | |
Initial release June 21, 2006; 10 years ago (2006-06-21) Stable release 6.4.2 / March 9, 2016; 11 months ago (2016-03-09) Type Collaborative development environment | ||
GForge is a free software fork of the web-based project-management and collaboration software originally created for SourceForge, called Savane. GForge is licensed under the GNU General Public License.
Contents
GForge provides project hosting, version control (CVS and Subversion), bug-tracking, and messaging.
In February 2009 some of the developers of GForge continued development of the old open source code under the new name of FusionForge after GForge Group focused on GForge Advanced Server.
History
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 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, "Server 51", was being readied for launch, VA Linux released the source code for the sourceforge.net web site on January 14, 2000 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. By 2001, the company's Linux hardware business had collapsed in the dotcom bust. The company was renamed to VA Software and called the closed codebase SourceForge Enterprise Edition to try to force some of the large companies to purchase licenses. This prompted objections from open source community members. VA Software continued to say that a new source code release would be made at some point, but it never was.
Some time later, 2002, Tim Perdue left VA, started GForge open source project based on the last publicly released version, 2.6, and merged the debian-sf fork, previously maintained by Roland Mas and Christian Bayle, into the project.
In February 2009, the Gforge GPL branch was forked to FusionForge in a renewed effort by Mas, Bayle, and others to revive the neglected GPL codebase and merge a number of other Gforge forks into a single project. Shortly after the launch of FusionForge.org the Gforge.org site switched from Gforge GPL (4.x) to Gforge AS (5.x) and increased the focus on supporting Gforge AS. This site change, as a formal response to the FusionForge fork, is believed to signal the end of the Gforge GPL branch.
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 (only for customers and with no trial available) 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
It is hard to determine with certainty whether these sites run on the open source or the closed source version of GForge. The guesses were made on 2010-02-15 based on the look-and-feel of these sites.