OpenDev is a collaboratory for open source software development at scale. Its focus is on code review, continuous integration, and project hosting provided exclusively through open source solutions like Git, Gerrit, Zuul, and Gitea. It also provides a number of peripheral collaboration services (like Mailman mailing lists, IRC bots for notifications and annotating text-based meetings, Jitsi-Meet for videoconference discussions integrated with Etherpad for collective text editing). All of these services are openly operated by the community, and continuously integrated and deployed using OpenDev itself. See the frequently asked questions in our infrastructure manual for details.
Free software needs free tools
OpenDev is built purely using open source software, unlike services such as GitHub or Gitlab.com which are proprietary (even though they're provided free of charge for use by open source projects). If development of your free and open source software requires interaction with proprietary code, is it truly free (as in freedom)?
Using open source technology reduces your reliance on outside parties and enables innovation. Developing software by using open source toolchains has the same effect. Nothing prevents a service provider from changing its terms of service, creating new limitations, blocking access for contributors connecting from specific countries, or even fully removing your project. Proprietary development services create the same form of hard limits, lock-in and dependency that proprietary software does, preventing open innovation in the development infrastructure space.
OpenDev goes one step beyond open source: it is also openly operated. Even its administrative tooling and configuration is open source, lives in Git, and is continuously-deployed. It serves as a clear example of transparent collaboration for systems administration. Like free and open source software, this requires engaging with the community to get the most out of it -- OpenDev is not a service you consume, it's a community you join. That can be a bit overwhelming if you just want to focus on development, especially when ready-to-consume services are available; but it's worth the effort, especially if you want to have a say in what services are provided, or support the idea of improving open source tools for software development.
Contact info
- IRC #opendev on OFTC (logs)
- Mailing list: service-discuss@lists.opendev.org (subscribe, archives)
- Important announcements: service-announce@lists.opendev.org (subscribe, archives)
- Status updates on Mastodon
Service vulnerabilities
If you find or suspect a security issue with any OpenDev services, please inform the administrators via email at service-incident@lists.opendev.org.
