Free Software Projects Using CVS

CVS is being used for free software projects. Because many such projects are collaborations of people throughout the internet, something like CVS's client/server protocol is particularly essential, and free software projects often want to be able to set up services such as anonymous access to sources, which CVS can provide via anonymous CVS and/or cvsweb. A few of the free software projects using CVS are:

Mozilla

Mozilla is the generic term referring to web browsers derived from the source code of Netscape Navigator. Mozilla.org provides CVS access to the Mozilla source and also plans to make available a number of interesting looking tools which work together with CVS. Here are some details about their hardware and use of CVS.

EGCS (over 50 developers on at least six different platforms)

egcs is an experimental step in the development of GCC, the GNU C compiler.

A bunch of us (including Fortran, Linux, Intel and RTEMS hackers) have gotten together to return to the fundamental idea that code visibility and submissions from the net are vital to the long term improvement of the compiler.

The GIMP

The GIMP is an image manipulation program which is cranking out quite a few cool images you may be seeing on the web and elsewhere. They provide access to their sources via anonymous CVS.

GNOME and Enlightenment

The GNOME desktop environment and the Enlightenment window manager are two popular programs. One interesting thing that Enlightment has instituted is the ecvs script which re-indents the code to a standard format before running CVS. This particular approach would work somewhat better if CVS were not so sensitive to timestamps (see technical discussion of how this could be fixed).

AbiWord

AbiWord is a project to write a full-featured open source word processor for both Linux and Windows.

libwww

The W3 Consortium is a standards-setting body which also distributes sample implementations as free software. One of them is libwww which is a library for implementing network protocols such as HTTP and FTP.

Wine

Wine is software to allow one to run Windows programs on other operating systems such as Linux. They have a nice web page describing their use of CVS, as well as related topics like nightly builds, bug-tracking, and more.

The Apache Group

The Apache Group relies heavily on CVS for development of the world's most popular web server. It is a highly collaborative effort spanning the globe. One Apache project is the Java-Apache project, notable because of their nice web page describing their use of CVS.

FreeAMP

FreeAMP is a project to produce the best digital audio player available. It is sponsored by GoodNoise, a record company who plans to sell downloadable music.

OpenBSD (over 50 developers)

The OpenBSD project involves continuing development of a free, multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system with emphasis on portability, standardization, correctness, and security.

OpenBSD has over 400Mbytes under CVS (over 60,000 files).

Giant Java Tree

The Giant Java Tree's primary aim is to create a giant Java source tree consisting entirely of freely redistributable software. They have a nice page giving their reasons for choosing CVS.

PHP

The PHP/FI web scripting language is another large collaborative programming effort using CVS.

Python

The Python folks provide CVS access to the latest Python sources. Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language particularly useful for scripting and other applications.

The FreeBSD Project (over 50 developers on one platform, FreeBSD itself)

The FreeBSD Project coordinates the development, maintenance, and distribution of the FreeBSD operating system, a popular Unix variant.

FreeBSD has at least 20,000 files containing over 400Mbytes of files maintained by CVS.

XEmacs

XEmacs is a powerful, extensible text editor with full GUI support. It is also much more than an editor, as the extensibility of XEmacs allows writing packages for programming, reading electronic mail, surfing the web, or a wide variety of other tasks. They have a nice web page describing their use of CVS.

PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL is a sophisticated Object-Relational DBMS, supporting almost all SQL constructs, including subselects, transactions, and user-defined types and functions.

The NetBSD Project

The NetBSD Project is the collective volunteer effort of a large group of people, to produce a freely available and redistributable UNIX-like operating system, NetBSD. NetBSD is based on a variety of free software, including 4.4BSD Lite from the University of California, Berkeley. It runs on a large number of hardware platforms and is highly portable. It comes with complete source code, and is user-supported.

Being added to this page

In response to the many requests we've had to add projects to this page, we expect future additions to be primarily via reciprocal links. To participate, first write up a web page concerning your use of CVS. It should contain at least one link to a Cyclic web page, and should have some link from your main home pages (for example from the "about us" page, the "about our web server" page, or whatever makes sense for you). Good things to mention are (1) how many people use CVS on how many platforms, (2) the approximate amount of source (number of files, number of megabytes) in a single CVS repository or a single directory in CVS, and (3) anything you have to say about why CVS is good choice for you. Then tell us the location of your CVS page.

You are encouraged to use one of the CVS logos if you so desire (but this is totally up to you).

Although we generally expect to link to pages which follow the above criteria, we reserve the right to decide what to link to.