Posted by andy@assembla.com Sun, 14 May 2006 21:18:00 GMT

Stephen Walli asks “What makes it different from sourceforge? (Okay, besides the lack of irritating ads.)”

Our goal is to support projects that have any kind of licensing or pemissioning – which is required for commercial work. Projects on Assembla.com can be private to the team, shared in a larger “trusted� group, or public. Sourceforge makes a big point of only taking OSI approved licenses for public projects, which I think is beside the point if you are trying to make good software. In fact, when we released Project.net last month using the same modified Mozilla license used by SugarCRM, Alfresco, and Zimbra (all on Sourceforge), they wouldn’t take it, citing the license.

There’s also the issue that Sourceforge is a good catalog, but a crappy collaboration environment. So, one of my other goals is to provide a space that teams can actually use. That’s why we went with Trac. I actually think it’s good.

There’s a third leg coming that isn’t visible at all right now, which is accurate profiling and recruiting of developers.

That will come in the form of “user-defined directories�, which is shaping up to be a very cool concept. Examples of user-defined directories would be generic developer profiles, java-specialist developers, a catalog of open source projects (same as sourceforge), or a catalog of government shared source projects. Each has its own user-definable listing form and search home page. But, each listing also goes in to the global pool of spaces. It hooks into all sorts of industry associations. For instance, we are offering to roll out directories for government agencies and government application projects in the rollup to next year’s GOSCON, and do matching around that.

We’ll work our way into it. Our business model is to provide a complete framework for recruiting and application services for on-demand teams – including application services, hosting, recruiting services, and payment services.