Why Fork?¶

In the last few years, the free and open source project management system Redmine has grown in popularity. Its user-friendly, extensible and flexible nature has attracted thousands of projects, companies, organizations, and individuals all around the world.

However, in the view of some of Redmine's leading developers, the maintenance and evolution of Redmine has not been as predictable and responsive as its developer community is capable of. Integration of community-created patches were too sporadic, lacked a clear methodology, and was interfering with the effectiveness of the Redmine project for its users. Over the past two years, several members of Redmine's community worked to resolve management bottlenecks through clear suggestions and contributions. They also attempted to broaden and open up the development process to more contributors. But efforts via public and private forums to discuss the goals and future direction with the project manager of Redmine failed, as the current project manager did not share these priorities.

A group of developers from the Redmine community has therefore concluded that the only way to ensure continued, sustained and stable development of our favorite project management solution is to fork it. We, long-standing community members and contributors, pledge to uphold the ideals of Free and Open Source Software ethics, governance and development practices in order to produce a reliable project management system released under the name of ChiliProject in February 2011.

We firmly believe in having a fully transparent and open governance and development process aligned with the ideals of Free and Open Source Software as outlined by both the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative. In particular, a free and open source project:

• Depends upon people producing useful software and supporting documentation, contributing as a team for the benefit of the community.
• Reflects a spirit of collaboration and fun while garnering community feedback and providing good governance that allows for businesses to confidently invest in further development.
• Is open to the participation of anyone who can contribute value and who is willing to work with the community.

The principal founders of ChiliProject are:

• Felix Schäfer - Redmine contributor, User support team lead, Plugin author
• Muntek Singh - Redmine contributor, Documentation team lead
• Holger Just - Redmine contributor, Plugin author
• Eric Davis of Little Stream Software - Redmine core committer, Plugin author, Former Redmine team lead (Plugins, Community Relations, Development)
• Wieland Lindenthal of finnlabs - Provider of Redmine based enterprise services
• Niels Lindenthal of finnlabs - Provider of Redmine based enterprise services