Freepository

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Freepository provides on-demand source code repositories that developers create, control and access from anywhere on the Internet using clients such as Eclipse, TortoiseCVS, WinCVS, the CLI and web browser.

Freepository has provided free accounts, now called Lite Accounts, since its founding in 1999. Tens of thousands of companies, universities and inviduals use Freepository to enable software development collaboration. As of October 2006, over 125,000,000 lines of code in more than 12,000 projects are hosted.

The Freepository source code was released under the GPL in September 2000. According to Construction of an Evaluation Model for Free/Open Source Project Hosting Sites, Haggen Hau Heng So, RMIT University, Sept 2005, "...[freepository] was probably the most feature-rich among the sites", and "...[freepository] was the most specialized site on the management of source code".

Freepository places no license constraints on software developed using it.

[edit] Freepository Features

Freepository provides hosted CVS and SVN accounts. Premium accounts receive integrated Trac, a popular software development project management package that enables Agile development practices.

All traffic to/from the site is via https or sserver, a client-server protocol that embeds a pserver-like transmission within an SSL channel. There are two variants of sserver, one of which is now integrated into CVSNT, making secure transmissions available to TortoiseCVS and WinCVS. The other sserver variant, invented by Corey Minyard and used at Freepository since 2002, was integrated into an Eclipse plugin by [Rolf Wilms]. In addition to web browser access to their source code repositories, many software developers globally connect securely to their remote Freepository-hosted source code repositories using these sserver-aware clients.