Free Software Foundation plans to launch a public code hosting and collaboration platform this year

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced on its blog that it plans to launch a code hosting collaboration platform (“forge”) this year to support the development and infrastructure of free software. Members of the FSF technical team are currently reviewing the ethics of the platform, which is said to help teams work on their projects and includes features such as merge requests, bug tracking, and other commonly used tools.

FSF states that infrastructure is critical to free software, but many websites that free software relies on for development have not yet released source code, and some even recommend or encourage users to use proprietary software. FSF created the GNU ethical repository criteria, which aims to set a high standard for free software code hosting platforms.

FSF plans to improve upstream the forge software of its choice to improve the score of these standards. The next step for the FSF technical team is to do more research on systems that meet the initial requirements to find the best option available.