Abstract
Open source software is required to be widely available to the user community. To help developers fulfill this requirement, Web portals provide a way to make open source projects public so that the user community has access to their source code, can contribute to their development, and can interact with the developer team. However, choosing a Web portal is not an easy task. There are several options available, each of them offering a set of tools and features to its users. The goal of this chapter is to analyze a set of existing Web portals (SourceForge.net, Apache, Tigris, ObjectWeb, and Savannah) in the hopes that this will help users to choose a hosting site for their projects.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Web Portal: A site on the World Wide Web that typically provides personalized capabilities to visitors (Wikipedia, 2006 AU18: The in-text citation "Wikipedia, 2006" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. ).
Forum: A discussion board on the Internet (Wikipedia, 2006 AU15: The in-text citation "Wikipedia, 2006" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. ).
Mailing List: A collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as the mailing list (Wikipedia, 2006 AU17: The in-text citation "Wikipedia, 2006" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. ).
Intellectual Property: Umbrella term used to refer to the object of a variety of laws, including patent law, copyright law, trademark law, trade-secret law, industrial design law, and potentially others (Wikipedia, 2006 AU16: The in-text citation "Wikipedia, 2006" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. ).
Version Control System: A system that tracks and stores changes on files (source code, binary files, and text files, among others). Such systems are able to retrieve old versions of a given artifact as long as such version has been stored some time before in the system.
Issue Tracking: Also known as bug tracking, it is a system designed to manage change requests of a software. It can also be used to manage bugs.
Task Management: Software capable of managing lists of pending tasks.