July 4, 2014
Software Freedom Conservancy is pleased to announce today its newest member project, Kallithea. Kallithea is a system for hosting and managing Mercurial and Git repositories. In contrast to GitHub (which serves only projects using Git and which projects cannot host locally nor modify), Kallithea supports both Mercurial and Git, and is released freely under the GNU General Public License, version 3 (GPLv3). Kallithea therefore makes the perfect companion to Conservancy's existing Mercurial and Git member projects.
Kallithea builds on work that RhodeCode GmbH released under GPLv3. Starting today, Kallithea, which is based on Mercurial itself, will be developed fully in public by a community of volunteers on a self-hosted site, called Our Own Kallithea. Kallithea welcomes GPLv3'd patches and contributions from the community at large to improve the software.
Bradley M. Kuhn,
President and Distinguished Technologist at Software Freedom Conservancy
lauded the volunteer community that brought Kallithea into
fruition: I've spent the last few months coordinating with the excellent
team of Kallithea volunteers — a community that seeks to embrace both
the letter and spirit of GPLv3. Their commitment to proper compliance is
refreshing in a time when compliance failures are so common.
Matt Mackall, chief maintainer of Mercurial noted: The Mercurial community is thrilled for this
opportunity to have a Free Mercurial hosting solution, and to have it under a
strong copyleft license. We are so glad we were able to work with Conservancy
to make Kallithea happen.
In discussing Conservancy's latest
project, Karen
Sandler, Executive Director, said: We are happy to provide the legal
and technical assistance in creating this new project. While Conservancy has
in the past served as an incubator where smaller projects can graduate to
their own organization, this is the first time that an entirely new project
has been created by existing members. We can't wait to see Kallithea
grow.