When it comes to collaborative development Tim Perdue practices what he preaches. Creator of the open source GForge collaboration platform, Perdue and his team are not centrally located and use its collaborative development environment (CDE) to orchestrate the software development process.

"My own team is scattered all over the world and we use GForge ourselves to manage our developers," Perdue says. "Tasks and defects are put into the queue and assigned to team members. They get notifications, wherever they are, and can also see a summary on their personal dashboard."

GForge aims to help manage the entire development lifecycle with tools to assist in collaboration, like message forums and mailing lists, tools to create and control access to source code management (SCM) repositories like CVS and Subversion. The CDE also automatically creates a repository and controls access to it depending on the role settings of the project.

Perdue believes the wider enterprise has already learned from the pioneering efforts of the open source community, which routinely produces software in a distributed, collaborative manner.

"They [enterprises] have engineers scattered in offices around the world, the same as we do," he says. "There just hasn't been any great tool to manage it all."