2. What is GForge?

GForge was developed by the Open Source community as an environment in which to host projects in a way that the code, documentation, binaries etc. were publicly accessible to all who wished to see them, and members of the public could use the software that was developed, and contribute feedback, bugs, ideas and suggestions, and even help to develop code/modules/documentation/resources for the software.

Traditionally it was used for software projects, although there is really no reason why it cannot be used to develop hardware or silicon projects also.

Generally, everyone needs to have read access to the data associated with a project, with (some of) the developers having write access to the data. Usually there is a maintainer of the code (the project leader or the person who registered the project) and contributers who email any changes to the code that they developed - bug fixes, additional functionality - which the maintainer adds to the code in the CVS tree upon verification that it was correct/clean/maintainable/useful.