Choosing an Open Source Hosting Service/License

Question

I am starting a game design project with a group of three other students. We would like to use some open source hosting service for version control, a wiki, etc. I have looked at threads like these (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10490/best-open-source-project-hosting-site, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29736/what-open-source-hosting-service-should-i-use, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_software_hosting_facilities) but am still not sure which is best for our situation. Those threads seem to focus more on large scale, long term open source projects, whereas my group will be small and working together for a relatively short time.

Here are my constraints:

• group of 4-5 people
• 10+ hours per week per person spent working on this project until May 2010
• Language/framework: C# XNA
• IDE: Visual Studio 2008
• project will be no bigger than 100 mb

Features that would be nice to have:

• Wiki
• Milestone tracking
• Issue/bug tracking
• Code reviews
• Document hosting (like the game manual, design spec, etc)

I'm thinking CodePlex would be nice because of its support for Visual Studio. I've had a positive experience with CodePlex in the past for a tiny project. However, Assembla has a nice UI, and its time tracking feature/linking tickets to SVN commits seems like it could be really helpful. (The time tracking in particular appeals to me, because if certain group members are slacking it could show through here.)

Google Code has been praised by many in the aforementioned threads, and everyone in my group has a Google account.

Also, I'm not sure which license we should pick for our project.

Answer 1

Google Code has been praised by many in the aforementioned threads, and everyone in my group has a Google account.

I think this coupled with easy usage of Docs/Groups/etc. and what not for things you dont nesscearily want public as well as group integration, all with interfaces that the entire team is most likely already used to working with, makes it a logical choice unless there are some features better fulfilled by another service in your opinion. In not nessecarily singing the normal paraises of google here - it just seems like a very pragmatic no fuss solution.

Answer 2

Codeplex already has lots of XNA related projects being hosted on it. One of the great things about codeplex is that you can choose from a large number of source control clients. It supports the TFS client, SVN, and mercurial. So from a flexibility perspective, it's very very simple.

From a license perspective ... well, you didn't really give enough information about what your goals are. Do you want a license like GPL, which ensures that your code can't be used in a closed source project dodwnstream? Do you not really care who does what?

Personally, for the open source projects I've hosted on codeplex, I prefer the mozilla public license. It basically says the code is as is, and you can do whatever you want with it, open or closed.