Linux Solutions

Sun Microsystems has launched a new website that looks to compete with Google Code and the numerous Forge sites, with its beta site Project Kenai. According to a blog post, the site was given a soft launch on Friday. The goal of the site is to host open source projects and encourage collaboration on them.

The Kenai Project is built on Ruby on Rails, and uses Subversion and Mercurial version-control systems and according to the Project Kenai site, it will be “more than a Forge.”

“We built it because we needed it, but it’s open for use by the world for free,” says project engineer Nick Sieger.

“Kenai is a recognition by Sun that, as the largest open source company in the world, we need to take control of our own destiny. We need a place to nurture and grow our open source communities that we ourselves can control; we need to demonstrate credibility in building on top of more traditional LAMP/SAMP web stacks (not just Java EE); and we need to show viability of Sun technologies and hardware for next-generation web applications,” he said

He continued, “By launching, I think we’re well on the way toward showing progress toward those goals. Where we go from here is going to be a blend of what the community asks of us and our own ideas for what we think would be cool new features to build on top of a collaboration portal that no one else has done yet.”

Project Kenai is likely to compete closely with Github. Git, written by Linux Torvalds has become an increasingly popular version-control system.

You can find much more on the servers and infrastructure behind Kenai at tbray.org. Sieger has already responded to the heat he has taken for the use of the word “control,” in explaining Kenai.