Today we submitted Allura to be considered for the Apache Software Foundation Incubator program.
Allura is the software that powers SourceForge’s developer experience. It offers source code hosting, discussion forums, issue ticket tracking, wiki, mailing lists, and much more. It’s been Open Source from day one under the Apache License, and we’ve decided that we want so much more.
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 in a tool that everyone can use and extend, and we believe Apache is the best place to steward the process.
The Apache Software Foundation is a non-profit that provides the legal and technical environment for Open Source projects to flourish. The Incubator is the mechanism for accepting new projects into the foundation. Today we’ve submitted our proposal to the Incubator, and over the coming weeks and months, will continue building a larger community around Allura.
We’re very excited about this step and think that it’s going to be a big turning point in the history of SourceForge. Many of us are thrilled because we have been huge Apache fans for more than a decade, and have been actively working to support the Apache OpenOffice podling. We look forward to collaborating with some of the brightest people in the world, and benefiting the thousands of Open Source projects that are hosted at SourceForge. It’s clearly the best of all possible worlds.
You can read more about Allura features, and you can read more about the Apache Incubator. We hope to be joining a truly stellar group of projects in the Incubator.
If you want to participate in the Allura development, there are many ways for you to get involved. There’s the source code, documentation, UI/UX, and just using it and telling us what you like or don’t like. We’d love to have you as part of the Allura development community.