Distributed Development of Closed Source Software?

An anonymous reader queries: "After being laid off recently, I got in touch with a few uni friends. We've now decided to start developing some software in our respective spare time(s), which we may consider commercializing depending on how it goes. We've come across a problem that I am sure is not very new. We are all in different countries and different time zones. How do we best collaborate given that we have such a diverse team." "Currently we think we need a service that provides the following:

1) CVS or some variant, subversion is fine
2) Bug tracking / issue tracking (bugzilla etc)
3) Discussion board with password protection (phpBoard / cute cast)
4) Some software that lets us book meetings in different time zones. (Calendar system which takes timezone differences into account)
5) Telnet (SSH) access is preferred
6) Shouldn't cost an arm and a leg

We are perfectly willing and capable of setting up some of it ourselves, if the service lets us log in via telnet. I know there are lots of services like this for open source development, but are there any for closed source? Have people used some service like this? A cost/feature comparason would be nice, if that information is available."

Comments

Telnet?

[Compuser]

If you are going to use telnet, might as well make
it open source...

Nice Try...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but we're not helping you bastards figured out how to make this "offshoring" thing actually work.

I tell you, if people could actually figure this out, I would be worried about offshoring. Until then, I'll continue to listen to story after story after story about disasters and clusterfuckers.

GForge

[Felonius Thunk]

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.

One opinion

[aminorex]

I've been doing distributed development since 1992. I advise using IRC as the primary means of coordination. You can use Yahoo Messenger chat rooms for free voip meetings, but you'd probably be better off running your own Asterisk server and using SIP phone hardware, since every software voice system I've ever seen sucks. CVS is the old work horse, but subversion is what has traction now, so there's little point in clinging to CVS.

You need a server somewhere. If you are a collection of real-live software developers, probably every last one of you has at least one server online, so it seems odd that you would be looking for a commercial service that gets to own your "closed" source code.
If you actually can't use one of your members' server installations for some reason, just rent a dedicated host and configure these things. None of them are terribly difficult to setup or manage. Any compentent linux admin, given a debian root prompt, could have them all up and running in a matter of an hour or so.

Seeing as you're going commercial

[DrSkwid]

If you want the proper answer to your commercial question then you need to ask me in my commerical consultant capacity, reasonable rates available.

Code Co-op

[stoborrobots]

Reliable Software makes a product called "Code Co-op: Server-less Version Control", (free trial, then cheap licence per seat) designed exactly for distributed closed-source development, especially where there is no central server. (I have never used it, but I came across their site more than 5 years ago when looking for good windows programming info, which they still have - also cool scientific programming info.)

That said, there's nothing you mentioned that you cannot do if you rent a *nix box and install alexandria, which powers sourceforge or Savane, which powers Gna.org, LCG Savannah and GNU/Non-GNU Savannah