Perforce Open Sources Popular Version Control Tools

Key Points:

• Perforce open sources the core command line interface (P4CLI) and the web-based client (P4Web) to its versioning engine via Perforce Workshop
• Major animation studio to collaborate with Perforce on open sourcing software critical to its big file management pipeline

ALAMEDA, Calif. (June 3, 2014) - Perforce Software today announced it has released open source versions of P4 CLI, its core command line interface to the company’s powerful versioning engine, and P4Web, its popular web-based versioning client. The newly released source code will allow developers to further customize these popular clients for their specific needs, giving them the power to adapt the clients to their evolving environments. All open source projects are available immediately on Perforce Workshop, an open source community built and hosted by Perforce.

P4CLI is the main command-line interface for Perforce’s versioning engine, P4D. It is heavily used by developers and DevOps for core versioning functionality and to build customized tools, plugins and automation for their environments. P4Web, a popular web client for P4D, allows developers to perform standard versioning operations through web browsers. A critical part of daily workflows, P4Web provides flexible and convenient access to all of a company’s versioned files.

By releasing P4CLI and P4Web to open source, Perforce is giving customers even more control over their development processes. Greater source code access enables a more streamlined development pipeline by allowing teams to build tools quickly and to better customize clients for a wide variety of hardware and platforms.

The move to open sourcing some of its most popular tools is not the first for the company. Perforce has already open sourced other popular clients including P4Perl, P4Ant and P4Win.

“Open source has been part of our DNA since the company’s inception. In fact, we released Jam, an open source alternative to Make, before the term open source was mainstream,” said Christopher Seiwald, founder and CEO at Perforce. “We’ve always offered all of our software for free to open source projects and we’re excited to continue our support with new open source releases in the future.”

Perforce Workshop was built using P4D and Perforce’s code review and collaboration tool, Swarm. This makes it highly attractive for projects that include big files, or those that are expected to grow to gigabytes in total size.

Perforce Workshop continues to attract open source projects from 3rd party organizations. Most recently, a major animation studio has selected Workshop to manage open sourced development for critical components of its animation pipeline.

With industry-wide open source efforts continuing to grow, Perforce invites developers to join Perforce Workshop and contribute to the animation studio’s project and numerous others projects. To find additional information on upcoming community events or join Workshop, visit http://swarm.workshop.perforce.com.