Sun Launches New Site for Hosting Open Source Projects

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?

According to the Project Kenai site, the goal is for it to be "more than a Forge." "We built it because we needed it, but it’s open for use by the world for free," says project engineer Nick Sieger. He adds, in this discussion:

"Kenai is a recognition by Sun that, as the largest open source company in the world, we need to take control of our own destiny. We need a place to nurture and grow our open source communities that we ourselves can control; we need to demonstrate credibility in building on top of more traditional LAMP/SAMP web stacks (not just Java EE); and we need to show viability of Sun technologies and hardware for next-generation web applications."

Project Kenai is likely to compete closely with Github.  Git, written by Linus  Torvalds, has become an increasingly popular version-control system. Kenai takes a different tack with Subversion and Mercurial, but it will be interesting to see what the backing from Sun adds to the mix for interested developers.

You can find much more on the servers and infrastructure behind Kenai here. Among other things found there, Sieger provides a respone to some heat he has taken for the use of the word "control," in explaining Kenai.