My last contribution to the OSOR platform

As you may know, OSOR and SEMIC will merge very soon to become Joinup. I have been working in OSOR since the very beginning, and today I helped Roberto Andradas to provide the last dump with the data that will be used by the new staff to feed Joinup.

More than three years ago, Juanjo Amor and Jesús M. González-Barahona offered me the challenge of coordinating a very young and passionate team to deploy, maintain and improve the platform. We made many mistakes but I am quite happy to see how we have learned. During the last year my contribution to OSOR was very small because Roberto Andradas took over the coordination, but I must confess that today I have a strange feeling (mixture of hapiness and sadness).

I would like to thank all the people that worked within the project during these years. It has been a pleasure. The OSOR community will migrate now to the Joinup platform with a different staff. Game is over for us, new adventures ahead.

Links collection about software forges: status, criticism and new ideas

During the last two years it is quite common to hear about new software forges, but I’m not going to talk about forges proliferation in this post, what I would to like to discuss it what the next step in collaborative development environments is. Thus in order to get the big picture I spent some hours looking for scientific and “informal” publications, now I think I have a good starting point and it would be great if you can offer feedback or even improve it.

The list of links contains papers, blog entries, presentations and reports. Some of them point out very interesting problems like the “data jail”, others re-think the concept of software forges like the paper named “The networked forge” and finally, some of the developers of the main software forges present what they do and what they want to do during next years.

Papers:

• “The Networked Forge: New Environments for Libre Software Development” by Jesus M Gonzalez-Barahona, Andrés Martínez, Alvaro Polo, Juan José Hierro, Marcos Reyes, J Soriano (2008)
• “Open Collaboration within Corporations Using Software Forges” by Dirk Riehle, John Ellenberger, Tamir Menahem, Boris Mikhailovski, Yuri Natchetoi, Barak Naveh, Thomas Odenwald (2009)
• “Collaboration in Software Engineering: A Roadmap” by Jim Whitehead (2007)

Blog entries:

• “COCLICO project’s efforts towards better forges interoperability (long)” by Olivier Berger (2010)
• “Three Systemic Problems with Open-Source Hosting Sites” by Eric S. Raymond (2009)
• Excerpt of a report made for the ministry of education calling for more forges pooling (sharing of maintainance costs, etc.) in France, by Olivier Berger (2011)
• “About software forges” by Carlo Daffara (2010)
• “Review: Free Software Project Hosting” by John Goerzen (2009)
• “[Discussions] Quick & dirty report from the OWF 2010 think tank on Open Forges” by Olivier Berger (2010)
• “GitHub, Collaboration, and Haters” by Elizabeth Naramore (2011)
• “What Black Duck Can Tell Us About GitHub, Language Fragmentation and More” by Stephen O’Grady (2011)
• “Everything you ever wanted to know about software forges (code forges), June 2011″ by David Williams (2011)

Presentations:

• “Choosing a software forge” by Joseph Roumier (RMLL 2010)
• “Fusionforge, one year and a half later” by Roland Mas (RMLL/LSM 2010)
• “The #Launchpad collaboration platform” by Jonathan Lange (#LSM2010)
• “A new #Savane” by Sylvain Beucler (#RMLL2010 / #LSM2010)
• “The OSS Forge Ecosystem” by Nathan Oostendorp from sourceforge (2010)
• “Coclico project” by Olivier Berger (2010)
• “Specifications for interoperability slides” by Olivier Berger (2010)
• “Spago4Q – Quality of OSS Forges” Davide Dalle Carbonare at fOSSa Conference (2010)

Reports:

• “Informe Técnico: Forjas: entornos de desarrollo colaborativo. Su integración en el ámbito empresarial. 2009” by LibreSoft (2009, in Spanish)
• “The business value of open collaboration” by IBM (2010)

I’ll submit this information to the planetforge wiki, as soon as it is posted there I will include here the link.

[This entry is part of the work I do in LibreSoft and it is also available in my blog at libresoft.es]

yet another software forge: openMyWork

Via acs I’ve seen that the Basque Government is promoting yet another software forge, its name is openMyWork. I haven’t seen either a list of features or a roadmap so the only thing I can offer is the description and the link.

openMyWorks is a project that includes the forges of the Basque Government. It is composed by openMyForge (the forge) and openMyDesktop (a desktop aplication). The software is developed using the web framework Web2py

[This post is also available in my blog at libresoft.es]

Open Forges summit in the OWF 2010

This Friday I’ll be in the Open Forges summit held alongside the Open World Forum in Paris, the main topic of the meeting is to find a way to foster the development and interoperability between forges to avoid data lock-in.

I hope I can meet there people from the planetforge community and many more persons interested on forges. After a couple of weeks off I’ll try to make the most of this meeting to get motivation to resume during October our contribution for fusionforge where we want to build a metrics plugin, we had a few personal issues that delayed the work but now we are giving rhythm again to the development.