The name “SourceForge” has been synonymous with development for years. Yet
despite that association, CollabNet, the commercial vendor that owns the
SourceForge Enterprise product line, is eliminating the SourceForge name from
its product line-up.
Starting today, the product formerly known as SourceForge Enterprise
Edition is being renamed TeamForge. The new TeamForge 5.2 release includes
new collaborative features and benefits from a new partnership that
CollabNet has with VMware to make it easier to build apps for virtual
deployment.
The new TeamForge release comes as the need for distributed
development in the cloud continues to increase and as new challenger to
CollabNet’s core Subversion version control system emerge in the open source
community.
“Since acquiring SourceForge Enterprise, we’ve been adding more tools and
capabilities that address the needs of distributed agile teams,” Rosie
Pongracz, director of product marketing at CollabNet told
InternetNews.com. “That’s really what this release is all about, and
the name change to TeamForge is to really reinforce our commitment and
capability for distributed teams across the application development
lifecycle.”
CollabNet acquired SourceForge Enterprise Edition (SFEE) from VA Software in 2007. SFEE is not the
same code or application that is used to power the popular SourceForge.net
open source code repository at this point.
SFEE is a proprietary,
closed source product that is a complete and total rewrite of the open
source code that powers the open source SourceForge.net code repository.
At the heart of the new TeamForge 5.2 release is enhanced Subversion
(svn) capabilities. CollabNet is the lead commercial sponsor behind SVN,
which it claims is used by approximately five million developers. With the
TeamForge, new role-based control has been added that is intended to help
distributed development teams to manage and access specific areas of code.
The are also new capabilities for cloud-based software development.
Pongracz, noted the new features enable developer to more easily build and
deploy applications for public clouds like Amazon EC2 as well as private
cloud deployments. TeamForge 5.2 lets developer provision resources in the
cloud as well as directly access resources.
Open Source Competition
Over the last two years, the git version control system originally
developed by Linux creator Linus Torvalds has gained in popularity, as has
the bazaar version control system in use by
Ubuntu Linux.
Richard Murray, vice president of engineering at CollabNet, told
InternetNews.com that he’s not too worried about the new open source
startups encroaching on the Enterprise space.
“Our enterprise customers, the vast majority of them, have chosen SVN for
collaboration and for centralization reasons to govern, audit, trace and
track,” Murray said. “We don’t see those customers moving to git and we
don’t see that as competing against our core enterprise business.”
A continuing focus for CollabNet is to get existing SVN open source users
to buy into CollabNet’s commercial offerings.
“It’s classic open source proliferation,” Murray commented. “SVN is all
over the enterprise and they want a way to wrap around those repositories
and provide governance and reporting. TeamForge is perfect for federating
repositories as repositories as well.”
