Everything you ever wanted to know about software forges (code forges), June 2011

Description

We have taken a list of 24 software forges and classified them according to what features and artifacts are present on that forge (as of early June 2011). The word cloud below represents the relative frequency of the forge tags. The links lead to tables that show what characteristics each code forge has.

We have a paper summarizing and extending these findings, which you can download as a pre-print attached to this posting. The citation is:

Squire, M. and Williams, D. (2012). Describing the software forge ecosystem. 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. Maui, Hawaii. January 4-7. pp 3416-3425.

Frequency of tags on forges: June 2011

You can also browse by specific artifact or feature list:
Project Metadata found at forges - what sort of data can we gather easily about the projects at each forge? (registration dates, lists of administrators/members? software licenses?)
Artifacts found at forges - what sort of publicly-available artifacts can researchers find at each forge? (mail archives, bug tracker reports, wiki histories, etc)
Features found at forges - what features does the forge offer for project teams? (Mailing lists, forums, wikis, etc)
Revision Control software found at forges - what sort of revision control software systems are hosted at the forge? (svn, cvs, bzr, git, etc)
Forge Policies - what policies does the forge itself have for projects hosted there? (free for floss projects, ad-free, etc)
Timeline of Forge Creation