A: OpenForge is Government of India's platform for open collaborative development of e-governance applications. Through this platform, the government wants to promote the use of free and open source software (FOSS) and promote sharing and reuse of e-governance related source code. The platform will allow collaborative development of source code for e-governance projects between Government departments / agencies and private organizations, institutions and developers.

A: OpenForge offers the following benefits:

• - to provide a platform for maintaining code repositories and version control for government source code
  
• - to promote a culture of open collaborative application development between public agencies and private organizations, citizens and institutions
• - to reduce development cycles and fasten the rollout of e-governance applications in the country
• - to deliver e-governance services and solutions of higher quality and security through increased transparency and mass peer review
• - to reduce e-governance project cost and bring down total cost of ownership through a system of reuse, remixing and sharing

A: Platforms like GitHub& SourceForge are indeed very popular, but they don’t focus on government applications. OpenForge is a specialised platform solely for Indian e-governance and civic applications. Also, many government departments may not be able to use these external platforms due to restrictions on sharing of code/data on foreign hosted servers (outside India) - OpenForge will enable these departments to collaborate and adopt open sourced development practices in a free manner.

A: OpenForge is targeted specifically at e-governance applications. Any project (applications, frameworks, languages, libraries, SDKs, APIs, datasets, components, plugins etc.) which deals with governance or civic areas is welcome. Applications without any apparent governance overlap are not allowed on the platform. OpenForge has a project approval system in place for exercising this control. And it reserves the right to decide on the suitability of a particular application for the platform.

A: Yes, the Government of India has three policies around open source software and source code sharing. They are as follows:
1) Policy On Collaborative Application Development by Opening the Source Code of Government Applications (namely "Source Open Policy") : This policy provides a framework for archiving government source code in repositories and opening these repositories for promoting reuse, sharing and remixing.
2) Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software for Government of India (namely "Open Source Policy") : This policy provides a framework for the preferred use of open source software systems in government applications and systems.
3) Policy on Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for Government of India (namely "Open API Policy") : This policy is aimed at providing a framework for opening up APIs in government applications for interoperability and integration with other e-governance systems.

A: Openforge is safe and secure to use. We are taking all precautionary measures to ensure your data is protected and uncompromised. Please find the list of security measures that have been implemented till now. This list will expand as more safety features get added.
1) Standard Practices: Openforge follows standard software development practices of uniform coding standards, guidelines and reviews. Every release is reviewed and tested internally for security and penetration vulnerabilities before getting deployed on our servers.
2) 256 Bit SSL Encryption: Openforge uses 256 bit secure socket layer (SSL) Encryption for information transmitted during any activity.
3) ISO 27001 certified Data Centre: The application is hosted in a ISO 27001 security certified data centre.
4) Data Redundancy: Data is backed up in secure environment with proper redundancy.
5) Security Audit: The Openforge application has been security audited by a recognized audit agency and the application security audit certificate has been obtained.

A: All software applications on OpenForge are free to download and there is no provision for any type of payments on the platform. However every project's usage conditions are governed by the license that the owner of the project chose for it. Please refer to the license conditions to know how you are allowed to use it.

A: No, there is no fees for using OpenForge.

A: OpenForge allows two possible collaboration models:
- Government to Community (G2C): In G2C, projects can be created in the public mode by either government or community members. Subject to the approval of the project administrators, anyone can participate in these projects and contribute to open collaborative source code development. The administrators can choose to configure the project access settings in whatever way suits them.
- Government to Government (G2G): In G2G, projects can be created in a controlled mode by government agencies/members only. Membership to these projects will be on approval basis (by the project administrators) and restricted to government entities only.
A special case of G2G is when a particular government department wants a project for private use without any external sharing (i.e. use OpenForge's code repository and version control for internal departmental development). Please note that this private use-case is only allowed for government entities.

A: On OpenForge, the project owner is free to assign any of the following licenses to their project during its setup process. 

• Apache License V2.0 ( http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• BSD License (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses)
• Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial License v2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/legalcode)
• Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike License v2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode)
• Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike License v3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode)
• GNU General Public License version 2.0 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html)
• GNU General Public License version 3.0 (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html)
• GNU Library or Lesser General Public License version 2.0 (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.0.html)
• MIT License (https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

A: OpenForge includes a number of features that provide granular control over repository access. The following access rights may be assigned to team members (or a smaller group within them) for each repository: 

• Admin - Full access to the repository, including the ability to control access for other users
• Read & Write - Users may write changes into the repository and read changes from the repository
• Read only - Users may browse the repository via the web interface and use Git or SVN to read changes but may not write back into the repository

A: The following user types are available on OpenForge:

• Anonymous Users: Users who are visiting OpenForge and browsing its pages while being in the logged-out state.
• Registered Users: User who have an OpenForge account and can access all public projects as per the access settings allowed by the project admins.
• Project Members: Registered users who have become a member of a particular project by contacting its administrator. Project members can be granted different levels of access by the project admins based on role definition.
• Project Administrators: Registered users who created a new OpenForge project become its administrators (or owners). They have full rights over their projects except project deletion - for which they have to contact OpenForge.