An open source software forge for European projects

Open Source is an increasingly interesting vehicle for dissemination of project results within the R&D and ICT FP7 communities. PROSE, an FP7 ICT project, is promoting open source adoption by creating a software forge that provides project management, source code hosting, and development support for the ICT and European open source projects. In this paper we present the key requirements for a software forge resulting from a public consultation of projects in the European space, and the corresponding instantiation of an open source software forge, publicly available at opensourceprojects.eu. We also discuss the relevance of a centralized collaboration platform for European projects, and the value presented by such an approach as opposed to current source code repositories.