Assembla Audit
This Audit demonstrates mainly:
- Limitations and Disadvantages of commercially oriented "Development Only Open Source"
- Importancy of analyst's independency and the mechanisms of an "Open Audit".
- Payment Protection Mechanisms for developers working within distributed teams
Notes
The assembla.com Portal is based on the Breakout Platform (build by Assembla Inc.). This Audit targets mainly the Assembla.com Portal as a project hosting platform - not the Breakout Product itself.
Summary
- Assembla is an Service which serves mainly business goals.
- User needs and Open Source is not prioritized.
- => not usable for medium/large scale project hosting
Report
The Assembla Service does currently not comply to requirements like e.g.
- Security Requirements (System Registration and Authentication is not SSL secured)
- Data Requirements (Data Backup/Restore not Available)
- URL Requirements (cannot point with own URL's to work spaces / tools)
- Customization Requirements (General Appearance is too "Assembla Breakout" centric)
- e.g. footer "Copyright 2006 Assembla"
Those are mostly technical details, which could be solved by contributions in an Open Source way.
But the stated "revolutionary new license" is an ordinary "Development Only Open Source" license.
This limits usage of the Assembla Breakout System significantly. A user is not free to setup the system in production, which would increase his interest to contribute.
At least theoretically, contributors are payed, and they must go through the process of so called "payed trial". In order to participate, they have to sign an commercial agreement (giving up any rights). Lightweight agreements (e.g. Joint Copyright) are not available.
The low contributor count and the commercially oriented nature of the project limit the user orientation, the contributor cound and thus the evolution speed of the Assembla Breakout System.
In order to use the assembla.com services, a rework became necessary. The goal was mainly to increase the quality of the Trac integration (Trac is a project management tool written in Python).
This promisingly started rework attempt (Assembla Rework Trac) has failed in a very unusual way:
- The team lead started to keep... silence (see Assembla Team Rating).
This silence has led to the need to verify a simple protection mechanism within the Joint Copyright Agreement?, see Copyright Payment Guarantee.
Topics
The statements above can be verified by the following detailed topics: