OStatic

The sites and services existing under the SourceForge umbrella have experienced some significant changes in the past several months. In the first three months of 2009, we've seen management changes and the re-direction of some SourceForge properties. SourceForge is ushering in another change -- free hosting for the Git, Bazaar, and Mercurial source code management systems. These services are now available to every open source project registered with SourceForge.net.

The new source code management (SCM) systems supplement SourceForge's Subversion and CVS support.

Many open source projects have been switching from CVS and Subversion to more flexible, distributed version-control systems. One of these is Git, written by Linus Torvalds, originally for use on the Linux kernel. There are a few ways to get the base Git package (with the Git command-line client and two basic graphical front ends) installed under Mac OS X. Our friends over at TheAppleBlog have a good post up on six of the best graphical tools for managing Git. Check it out.?

Sun Microsystems has launched a new effort to compete with Google Code and various Forge sites with its beta site Project Kenai (pronounced Keen-Eye). According to a blog post, the site was launched quietly on Friday, and a primary goal of the site is to host open source projects and encourage collaboration on them. Project Kenai is built on Ruby on Rails, and uses Subversion and Mercurial version-control systems. How will this compete with similar sites?

Slashdot passes on the news of Code_Swarm, a new project from Michael Ogawa, who has been working in the field of software visualization for a while now. The videos that it generates are pretty (here's the one for Apache 2), as we've noted, and they do serve to give you an idea of the pulse of activity in a particular project. You can pick out whether code or documentation commits prevail, as well as see major contributors rise and fall.

The up-and-coming version control system git has begun to prove its mettle outside of Linux kernel development. The Ruby on Rails community has embraced it wholeheartedly with many core projects migrating to the system recently. The climate has become right for businesses to spring up in the wake of this adoption.

Many open source projects are switching from CVS and Subversion to newer, distributed version-control systems. One of those is Git, written by none other than Linus Torvalds, originally for use on the Linux kernel. Git is becoming increasingly popular for use on other projects, as well. Why?

The Internet has, of course, been essential to the growth of the open source movement. Most communication among the developers of an open source project takes place via e-mail, IRC, or even instant messaging.

Version control systems seem to run in waves in the open source world. For many years, the venerable CVS had the lion's share of usage. Then along came Subversion, with the announced goal of being a compelling replacement for CVS. Subversion has gained enough popularity to be the baked-in choice in many tracking and management tools. Lately, though, I've been seeing more and more interest in git - the system used to track changes to the Linux kernel itself, among many other things.