We’ve been using free and open-source software at silverorange for years now. In the last year, though, we’ve begun releasing more of our internal web-development software stack under an open-source license.
While our Swat web application toolkit (it’s not a framework) has been open since it’s inception, it has been missing some of the key infrastructure required for a healthy open-source project. The code was available, that was about it.
Now, with the new code.silverorange.com website (based on Trac - a past nominee for silverorange employee of the year), we finally have the rest of the public project infrastructure in place.
Most importantly among these changes, we finally have a public bug-tracking system! This took longer than expected because we had Swat bug-tracking tied in with our internal (private client) project tracking. The two are finally separated, and everything that should be open is now out in the open.
We’re are also now in a position to grant SVN commit access to external contributors when appropriate.
The silverorange code site isn’t limited to Swat either. We have a whole set of packages we use for developing client sites, including a back-end website administration package, an e-commerce package, a photo-gallery package, and a (fledgling) weblog package. Each of these projects now has a section of it’s own on the code.silverorange.com site, and they share a mailing list and Jabber chat room with Swat.
For those who have been patient enough to follow and participate in our open-source projects so far, we’re appreciative. We hope to be much more open to external collaboration and contributions with this new infrastructure.