The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache™ Allura™ as a Top-Level Project

[Sally Khudairi <sk...@apache.org>]

>> this announcement is also available online at http://s.apache.org/bJE

Open Source collaborative software development platform in use at DARPA, DLR German Aerospace Center, Open Source Projects Europe, and SourceForge, among others, to manage source code repositories, bug reports, discussions, wiki pages, blogs and more

Forest Hill, MD –01 April 2014– The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 170 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that Apache Allura has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache Allura is an Open Source, extensible, web-based platform that provides integrated software tools for collaborative software development. Initiated by SourceForge in 2009 to manage source code repositories, bug reports, discussions, wiki pages, blogs, and more for any number of individual projects, collection of projects or hierarchies of projects, the Allura forge was submitted to the Apache Incubator in June 2012. 

"The journey through the Apache Incubator made Allura a project for the community by the community," said Dave Brondsema, Vice President of Apache Allura. "I can't wait to see other Apache projects start using Allura, and hope to catch up with other Apache projects at the upcoming ApacheCon 2014 in Denver!"

"SourceForge has demonstrated their dedication to Open Source by putting their crown jewels into the custodianship of the Apache Software Foundation, and I'm excited to see where the project goes next as it embraces a larger community of users and developers," said Rich Bowen, Executive Vice President, Apache Software Foundation.

Apache Allura features include:
 - integrated issue tracking;
 - markdown formatting, including links to other artifacts (tickets, discussion/comments, commits, etc);
 - artifact subscriptions through mail and RSS;
 - a built-in discussion forum with a granular permission facility that allows for posts either via web or mail; 
 - a blog tool with threaded discussion; 
 - a code repository that hosts code with git, Mercurial, or Subversion with graphical representation formats


Allura allows for accelerated collaborative development across an array of user communities. Sites powered by Apache Allura include SourceForge, Open Source Projects Europe, DLR German Aerospace Center and DARPA's VehicleForge, among others.

"BerliOS recommends the SourceForge platform for migrating projects currently hosted on BerliOS. We value the fact that the SourceForge platform was first accepted as an Apache Incubator project and we are glad to see it now graduated," said Lutz Henckel, berliOS project leader. "This achievement means SourceForge platform --now known as Apache Allura-- is backed by a diverse and well-structured community. For projects hosted on SourceForge it also reduces the risk of vendor lock-in, as developing projects can get their data and software directly from the platform."

"Apache Allura is an Open Source modular forge platform using a scalable architecture and with well-known technologies around Python," says Alvaro del Castillo, Apache Allura committer and CTO of Bitergia. "It is easy to install and configure, a good bet for the future of collaborative software development around forges."

Apache Allura helps community members effectively manage any number of projects, including groups of projects known as neighborhoods, as well as sub-projects under individual projects. It has a modular design to support tools attached to neighborhoods or individual projects. The tools within Apache Allura were designed to support version control for source code repositories, ticket tracking, discussions, wiki pages, blogs and more. Additional external and third-party tools can be installed.

"We entered the Allura community to suggest the introduction of new functionalities to improve awareness of people and projects. We found that the community was open to our ideas," said Elisabetta Di Nitto, Associate professor of the University of Milan. "As a researcher I think this was a very interesting experience. We are glad we could influence the development of the forge and that the Allura community found our suggestions useful."

"SourceForge is very happy that Apache Allura, already used by 431,000 projects, will now be extended and available to an even wider developer community," said Gaurav Kuchhal, General Manager of SourceForge and Slashdot. "We stay committed to promoting open source projects by providing free marketing and global distribution, no matter where projects are developed."

Apache Allura is the result of an estimated 53 years of effort (as calculated by the COCOMO – Constructive Cost Model), with nearly 3,496 commits by 24 individual contributors (representing 208,417 lines of code).

Availability and Oversight
As with all Apache products, Apache Allura software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For documentation and ways to become involved with Apache Allura, visit http://allura.apache.org

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than one hundred and seventy leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 400 individual Members and 3,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Budget Direct, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, Huawei, IBM, InMotion Hosting, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco,
 and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow @TheASF on Twitter.

"Apache", "Apache Allura", "Allura" and "ApacheCon" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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