The Networked Forge: New Environments for Libre Software Development

Libre (free, open source) software forges (sites hosting the development infrastructure for a collection of projects) have been stable in architecture, services and concept since they become popular during the late 1990s. During this time several problems that cannot be solved without dramatic design changes have become evident. To overcome them, we propose a new concept, the “networked forge”, focused on addressing the core characteristics of libre software development and the needs of developers. The key of this proposal is to re-engineer forges as a net of distributed components which can be composed and configured according to the needs of users, using a combination of web 2.0, semantic web and mashup technologies. This approach is flexible enough to accommodate different development processes, while at the same time interoperates with current facilities.