Sun Launches New Site for Hosting Open Source Projects

by Sam Dean - Sep. 15, 2008Comments (5) | Trackback URL

Sun Microsystems has launched a new effort to compete with Google Code and various Forge sites with its beta site Project Kenai (pronounced Keen-Eye). According to a blog post, the site was launched quietly on Friday, and a primary goal of the site is to host open source projects and encourage collaboration on them. Project Kenai is built on Ruby on Rails, and uses Subversion and Mercurial version-control systems. How will this compete with similar sites?

According to the Project Kenai site, the goal is for it to be "more than a Forge." "We built it because we needed it, but it’s open for use by the world for free," says project engineer Nick Sieger. He adds, in this discussion:

"Kenai is a recognition by Sun that, as the largest open source company in the world, we need to take control of our own destiny. We need a place to nurture and grow our open source communities that we ourselves can control; we need to demonstrate credibility in building on top of more traditional LAMP/SAMP web stacks (not just Java EE); and we need to show viability of Sun technologies and hardware for next-generation web applications."

Project Kenai is likely to compete closely with Github.  Git, written by Linus  Torvalds, has become an increasingly popular version-control system. Kenai takes a different tack with Subversion and Mercurial, but it will be interesting to see what the backing from Sun adds to the mix for interested developers.

You can find much more on the servers and infrastructure behind Kenai here. Among other things found there, Sieger provides a respone to some heat he has taken for the use of the word "control," in explaining Kenai. 

 


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5 Comments
 

Do we really need another hosting site? Doesn't sourceforge serve as the comprehensive hosting site. Didn't quite understand the Google Code rationale to begin with but it seems like everyone else is following in-step and soon we'll have a 100 different places to look for FOSS...

0 Votes

Let's not forget that Sun already has Java.net too. How will this be different? Was that just an example of poor branding (restricting things to Java)?

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We need a hosting site with support to DataBase and technology J2EE, to test our projects.

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Git, written by inus (not Linux) Torvalds.....

0 Votes

It has some similarities with javaforge.com, codebeamer.com and sourceforge, but but in implementation some years behing these platforms. Will/can Sun really compete with Google on this?

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