Reactivating CoopX : Idea of a project towards interoperable software development hosting platforms

CoopX … that name doesn’t remind you of anything ? …

Well, it’s the name of an old project, started in 2001, whose goal was to try and gather people working on different software development hosting platforms in order to elaborate a standard for interoperability between these platforms.

AFAIK, some progress was made but the project did not deliver anything really useful that could be integrated into the existing platforms. Everybody involved was quite busy elsewhere and the project, only based on volunteer contribution stalled for a while… until its website (http://coopx.eu.org) eventually became unavailable (in the meantime a crash of the tuxfamily platform occurred, which didn’t help… but the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine hopfully have saved a copy… although it’s not responding at the time of writing – Update : finally working, so here is the link.).

This kind of idea is still something that might be worth investigating… and who knows, maybe this time, it would be possible to draw enough support to work in way so that existing platforms really benefit from that work.

At the ObjectWeb conference in January, I’ve attended the tutorial “T4- Inter-organization Cooperative Development with GForge” (see details and slides in https://wiki.objectweb.org/ObjectWebCon05/Wiki.jsp?page=Tutorials)I’ve met some developers who work on the GForge platform (maybe the only generic platform available as libre software to be used by a substential number of projects), and other people who work on similar platforms. We continued the discussion and somehow came the idea of maybe trying to do something in order to foster the creation of a second generation of interoperable platforms, mainly based on GForge.

Since the conference, we’ve been exchanging emails, and I’ve also discussed the idea with collegues in the Calibre project, who are also interested in the idea. All have a solid background in libre software study and development.

I’ve tried to summarise very briefly (3 pages) the main challenges I can see in such a project in a presentation I’ve made at a EC infoday on 22nd of april. This 2 minutes presentation (that I somehow screwed up 😉 nevertheless draw some interest from attendance (and maybe also from EC people to whom I talked later). So it looks like it may be time for such a project ? … I will try to write a more detailed content than ths 3 pages slides ASAP.

I think the fore-coming IST FP6 call 5 may provide a good oportunity for funding a RtD project that would deliver specification and implementation of interoperable platforms for hosting libre software development, since it reserves one of its action lines for open source (see my previous post).

I would be very interested in participating to such a project considering our previous efforts in the field of libre platforms for collaborative software development (on PicoLibre), and more generally in the field of libre groupware (on ProGET : see previous post)… but I’m not sure if I’m willing to dedicate the amount of energy required for the setup of an FP6 proposal, or if I even have the capacity to do so 😉

Anyway, any interested party is welcome to talk to me… and we’ll probably setup some way to collaboratively think and elaborate a proposal maybe ?

I’ll keep you informed via this blog of what happens.