Forging and the meaning of a Forge

In matrix discussion related to @dachary’s struggle whether to use the term “forge” in the Friendly Forge Format generic grant application I proposed the following in terms of characterization of its meaning:

I think there’s an opportunity here, also mentioned before (was it by @realaravinth ?)

The concept of “forge” is not widely known. Like I said… I learned it when I found ForgeFed. Gitlab and Github don’t use it. It is exclusive to the FOSS world…
That means there’s an opportunity. We can really ‘brand’ this concept and give it the appropriate meaning. And then I think of it as a more or less abstract concept. While code forges exist, they each have very different feature sets. They all offer aspects of this abstract “forge”. So:

Forging: The craft and artistry of creating free software projects.

The “Forge” is a whole range of stuff. It emcompasses the entire maker space, if you will.

And there’s a relationship between “Forge” and “FSDL”. The FSDL are all the tools hanging in the rack of the forge.

Close to the fire.

Note: Free Software Development Lifecycle or FSDL is being elaborated as a pattern & practices library in Discuss Social Coding.

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