SourceForge Allura Submitted To the Apache Software Foundation Incubator

rbowen writes "The software that powers the SourceForge developer tools (SourceForge is owned by the same corporate overlords as Slashdot) has been submitted to the Apache Software Foundation Incubator. The SourceForge Blog reads: 'By submitting Allura to the Apache Incubator, we hope to draw an even wider community of developers who can advance the feature set and tailor the framework to their needs. With the flexibility and extensibility Allura allows, developers are free to use any number of the popular source code management tools, including: Git, SVN, or Mercurial. We are indeed willing to turn our own open source platform into a tool that everyone can use and extend, and we believe Apache is the best place to steward the process.'"

Comments

Re:How about...

[TemporalBeing]

The ASF seems to have become the dumping ground of unloved commercial software.

May be, but only for project sponsors that are seeking to exit the project sponsorship.

Oracle chose ASF for various legal reasons. APL was better suited to how Sun was using the OOorg code-base than GPL to start with, and Oracle realized that the community really doesn't like them, and that OOorg type software was not their strong point. ASF is a US organization, so it made it easy not just to get a tax write-off for the donation, but also easy to transfer legally as there were fewer laws to deal with.

Subversion moved to ASF as well; though I don't know the reasoning there, but the community transferred and has flourished just as much as it was under tigris.org.

SourceForge's though is a hub of open source software, and their website interface was originally GPL. They moved it to a pure Commercial several years back, at which point gForge, GNU Savannah, and a few others popped up and continued with the last GPL'd version. (Actually, I think gForge was around earlier, but kept in step with it.) They already provide a well respected hosting site for open source software; they've already had it under the GPL; so why hand it to ASF? Why not just put it back out under the GPL and host it again? Even going to the APL is not an issue for them hosting it on their own site, and ASF would mean an entirely different infrastructure. It makes no sense.