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...they just start releasing the GPL version again. The removal of the GPL version is why there is Savannah, gForge, and a number of others. No need to go to the APL.

It used to be. Then they closed it. Then last FLOSS version was forked as GForge and others. I guess they're opening it again.

I am interpreting the O.P.'s information request as a request for endorsements for a product suitable for building an online community for a call center and not a request for an already active online community for a call center. I am also assuming that the call center is for an ISV. Here are a few recommendations that are my favorites.

• My favorite open source product for this sort of thing is GForge. It's got lots of call center friendly features and is also a hit with the coders.
• The full featured yet non-open source version of GForge is SFEE.
• Please don't mod me down, post nasty replies, or take away my karma points but may I feebly and humbly suggest my own product Code Roller? It's not open source yet but it is free (as in beer). Code Roller is not currently a perfect fit for call centers but has lots of great features that are conducive to managing the full life cycle for software development.

What about http://www.gforge.org? They have an open source product (based on Sourceforge branch?). They also have an Express Edition (free) and Advanced Server edition (commercial) available through http://www.gforgegroup.com./ I just started looking into their products and I've installed GForge EE, though we haven't really used it in anger yet.

> For a company of our size, they package this as a VMWare image.

FWIW, there are also GForge VMWare appliances out there. I can see how it'd make a normal installation easier to troubleshoot, too, if you had a VMWare installation for comparison.

And of course, it's awesome that they both run on PostgreSQL, great stuff!

A fork of SourceForge - GForge - is indeed free and open source. It's a bit painful to set up, but there are commercial support options. And there are lots of sites out there that are using it...

A fork of SourceForge - GForge - is indeed free and open source. It's a bit painful to set up, but there are commercial support options. And there are lots of sites out there that are using it...

I'm going to be starting on a spare-time open source project pretty soon and was wondering what people recommend for collaboration. The biggest project I worked on was the jboss portal server(previous version) and communication to developers(non-jboss employed at least) seemed to be mostly by email and forums. It was a little hard to know for sure if someone else was working on the same thing as me until a cvs commit. All the jboss guys I delt with were really helpful, but because of some of the reasons outlined in the article I kind of always wanted a better way...

Thankfully the new project I'll be working will have 2 main developers in the same city so we'll actually have some sit down sessions but so far almost everything is in email. What are good collaboration practices(the article mostly just said email sucks)? For software I'm currently investigating gforge with the wiki plugin. Does the slashdot community like wikis for collaboration between developers on software development projects or something else? Does all this really get solved when you have a dedicated project manager? Should your collaboration tool also be your project management tool? Any good project management tools(esp. ones that combine collaboration software). Thanks!

Right now I am root on one of the biggest private GForge implementations in the world, and we use PostgreSQL on the back end. I've been thoroughly impressed with it. There were some complaints when I came on board about PostgreSQL falling over but when I looked into it, to my astonishment, there were a number of problems with the system configuration that caused PostgreSQL to run out of available connections. It had never been tuned from the default settings! So no problems were seen until we were past 17,000 developers. Honestly, I still haven't tuned it. Haven't needed to. It's very fast with the default configuration and once I got the OS and the hardware tuned that it was sitting on, it ran faster than ever.

I've managed PostgreSQL at a few shops and usually about the time someone is ready to rip it out and replace it with Oracle, it's because the DBA is a paper tiger who was only trained and certified in Oracle and doesn't know how to tune PostgreSQL, and won't take the time to learn.

If Trac isn't your cup of tea. You might take a look at GForge It's the OSS version of Source Forge that you can run internally.

VA closed the code years ago. But there is a fork from the original author at gforge.

Isn't it funny that Sourceforge.net is the most popular repository and project tracker for OSS projects, yet it's run on closed-source software?

Of course, there's always gforge.org if you want something similar, that's actually Open Source.

So basically they've recreated http://www.gforge.org/ out of proprietary components.

Seems perfect for Nokia, especially since newer versions of GForge have a SOAP API; they could have shown some examples of a Nokia phone accessing GForge via a little proxy or some such.

And GForge certainly could handle the load; check out the numbers on some of the bigger installations on the list of public GForge sites.

Seems perfect for Nokia, especially since newer versions of GForge have a SOAP API; they could have shown some examples of a Nokia phone accessing GForge via a little proxy or some such.

And GForge certainly could handle the load; check out the numbers on some of the bigger installations on the list of public GForge sites.

...is the largest public GForge server in the world.

There's a picture of their server rack as of a year or so ago right here.

...is the largest public GForge server in the world.

There's a picture of their server rack as of a year or so ago right here.

Although trac is quite good and integrates well with SubVersion, it has a few disadvantages, the main one being no support for multiple projects.

Scarab, the open-source bug tracking tool that CollabNet's commercial offering uses and GForge, although cumbersome to setup are IMHO better alternatives if you're looking for bug-tracking tools to use along with SubVersion

--
Ravi

http://gforge.org/ - based on an OSS sourceforge version. this should cover the cvs, documentation, etc needs for any project.
its also getting to be quite popular eg rubyforge, http://alioth.debian.org/ etc.

You really need just three things, and in my experience, nobody bothers to even go this far.

What might help is a project management infrastructure to assist in doing these things.

For design documentation and documentation in general you need a rudimentary content management system. It can be as simple as document repository under version control.

For e-mails to track changes and record on-going discussions and debate, use a change management system like Request Tracker or a threaded discussion group program with email notification.

Gforge, Tudos and trac are complete systems for managing development.

Having project management infrastructure in place at all times means that you can turn anything that requires more then, say, one person working two days, into a formal project with minimal overhead.

These systems reduce the number of face-to-face meetings that eat into development time and at the same time improve communication. The result is that there can be a measurable improvement in even the smallest project. Perhaps, especially in the smallest projects.

...lots of those out there already; more on GForge here.

Splitting up the project load makes sense to me; that way one site - SourceForge - doesn't have to bear the full load. Also, it lets folks do custom things to make their site more useful - like Graal.

...lots of those out there already; more on GForge here.

Splitting up the project load makes sense to me; that way one site - SourceForge - doesn't have to bear the full load. Also, it lets folks do custom things to make their site more useful - like Graal.

btw, according to GForge list, we are 9th biggest public GForge site.

raj

I just think that, really now, who, other than huge developers who most likely have something similar to this, is really going to use this?

We use it internally at my work as do many other companies from what I understand. It's great for handling internal customer requests and project tracking. In fact, if I had my way, GForge would be the core of our entire intranet.

So yeah, most single developers may not set this up on their home network, but as soon as you have a team (even a small team), it's a really great tool.

Check out this list of GForge powered sites.

> GForge has all of this

Yup, GForge rocks. I help admin CougaarForge for a government project; GForge has worked out really well. It's not resource-intensive, either - we run 34 projects and 700 users on one dual proc machine with _plenty_ of horsepower to spare.

Lots of other folks are running GForge servers too...

GForge has all of this and is probably exactly what you're looking for. I haven't used it yet, but a couple of friends and I are planning to pretty soon. Also, free (and Free) is good. BYOS(erver), is all.

GForge really is great. We're using it internally at my workplace for request tracking and project management. Now, if only 4.0 would come out soon... :)

...right here.

It's powered by GForge, so it's backed by PHP and PostgreSQL.

There are a bunch of other sites running GForge listed here...

...right here.

It's powered by GForge, so it's backed by PHP and PostgreSQL.

There are a bunch of other sites running GForge listed here...

I agree. I run slackware at home and just finished installing a GForge instance on Slackware 10 at work. So very nice.

...can be found on sarovar.org... it's one of the biggest public GForge sites out there.

...can be found on sarovar.org... it's one of the biggest public GForge sites out there.

...can be found on the Big List Of GForge Sites.

Props to Tim Perdue for picking a solid database on which to build GForge!

...can be found on the Big List Of GForge Sites.

Props to Tim Perdue for picking a solid database on which to build GForge!

...is in the spinoff projects. For example, this open source Java memory profiler is a spinoff of the DARPA-supported COUGAAR agent framework.

And since both projects are hosted on a server running GForge, I can help improve GForge during working hours. Good times!

....i.e., right here. Looks sort of GForge-ish, although with frames and a custom theme and such-like...

Note that I had to change the filenames slightly to get GForge to accept them... it didn't fancy the "+". Just in case anyone notices...

> the site (and the project) is up
> and running just fine

Actually, now it appears to be Slashdotted.

For what it's worth, if you're running a GForge site (as Agnula is doing), you may want to upgrade to the latest release - 3.3 - and enable the localization cache. I've got it running on RubyForge and it pretty much cut response time in half for most requests. Props to Guillame Smet for his work on that one.

> the site (and the project) is up
> and running just fine

Actually, now it appears to be Slashdotted.

For what it's worth, if you're running a GForge site (as Agnula is doing), you may want to upgrade to the latest release - 3.3 - and enable the localization cache. I've got it running on RubyForge and it pretty much cut response time in half for most requests. Props to Guillame Smet for his work on that one.

> GForge doesn't actually
> host projects (besides its own)

Right on. That's made clear in the answer to question # 1 of the FAQ.

> what's the GForge license?

GPL.

tperdue has the docroot in his home directory:

Insecure!

...already. Savannah moving over is certainly a big one, though.

Stuff like this is why we're continuing to optimize GForge's SQL...

...in 4 days playfair has gone to second place on their download counter. Jeepers.

Sarovar will be moving higher on the list of GForge sites pretty soon... they're # 12 currently...

...check out SemWebCentral, which is a GForge installation hosting a fair number of Semantic Web-related projects. There's even an OWL mode for Emacs!

And there are also some tutorials and such-like.

...this? It sounds like the same thing.

Sounds like a perfect opportunity for another GForge installation... one more for the list!

...this? It sounds like the same thing.

Sounds like a perfect opportunity for another GForge installation... one more for the list!

Co-owners Ken and Tom Carlton spent $200 a month to get an ad for their
business to pop up when someone searched for "roll forming," a process that
turns metal into different shapes.

Why not recommend gforge rather then sf? Sourceforge's code is untouched for a few years now, right? While gforge is opensource and being currently developed.

...to manage its projects - right here.

Seems like GForge is all over the place... here is a list of some known sites, and of course - shameless plug - RubyForge.