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SourceXChange Closes Doors
It's been coming in through the proverbial grapevine that SourceXChange has been closed by its' parent Collab.net. In the closed doors page they've got, Collab notes that they are focusing on a code development environment they've been working on - it's a lot like what SourceXChange was doing, but installing for people looking for collabrative development tools.
Anywho looks to me like it's still up.
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A site with a similar idea is Cosource.com. The projects there tend to be a lot smaller in scope, but there are a lot more to choose from. Hopefully they won't end up in the same boat as SourceXChange.
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Nothing. There is no relationship between GameXchange and SourceXchange, except that the names are similar.
Great product, bad marketing. They had some 10 thousand developers signed up, open source and Linux all over the news, and a shortage of good programmers available to companies. All during a Tech boom that had companies scrambling for new ways to get work done. And yet they couldn't get enough projects.
At the start they had some interesting projects posted by HP. But after that available projects slowed nearly to a stop. The ones that did show up were from smaller companies that offered too little money, and even those were slim pickings.
It looks to me like they focused all their attention on the product and neglected the sales pitch to companies, who should have been eager participants. I don't think ``open source'' had anything to do with their failure.
The biggest one I can think of is OpenOffice, which has a little tiny "powered by collab.net" logo at the bottom of the front page. Since this one's on Sun's bankroll (more or less) it'll likely continue, but what about the rest of 'em?
here is the content of the letter from Brian. As of March, 2001, SourceXchange has officially closed its virtual doors. While a unique idea and one that we feel really adhered more closely to the Open Source ideal than any other work-for-hire site ever did, it simply did not achieve the volume of business necessary to maintain the site and evolve the offering to meet the needs of sponsors and developers. Thank you to the hundreds of participants on our various projects, and to the sponsors who were willing to take a risk on a new model (and who, by and large, got good results). CollabNet is now focusing its full attention on its collaborative software development product called SourceCast. Happy Hacking! Brian
Help fight continental drift.
I had the impression when I interviewed that they were barely getting bye. I think if they survive they will probably go through a few rounds of layoffs....
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Just because something is good does not mean it will make a profit, just as something that makes a profit is not automatically good (other than the money it may produce). Redhat may be the popular distro to demonize because they have their eyes ont the money, but until we live in a society that automatically pays for "good ideas", the bottom dollar is the driving force.Microsoft and other big players have shown time and time again that lots of money will almost always win out over a great product which is not properly marketed. Think about the IBM PC Jr. I owned one. It was a one of IBM's biggest mistakes, but because of !! AWESOME !! marketting, what looked to be a dooming failure turned a profit. PcTools is an example who started out of the gates like lightening with great marketting strategy, but later got wiped off the face of the earth by Norton's better marketting and Microsoft's money.Linux and the free software environment have proven that you can not easily kill free software that is freely maintained, but the simple truth is it does cost people their time to develop and maintain the software.Personally, I think it is great that RedHat can help push Linux farther along while making money selling training and support (assuming the latest lawsuit does not wax the company). I liked what SourceXChange was trying to do, but you can't fund a business on likes. Remember, programmers have to eat too (even if it is mostly, pizza, mex, chineese, or something from a vending machine).
In a place beyond time and space, in a land far better than this, look for me there...
Perhaps my mind is just in the gutter, but upon glancing at the headline I could've sworn it said SexChange Closes Doors. Perhaps it's because there are two other sex related articles on the front page, but then again, maybe not.
Note there are two uses:
What? The second usage of "its" (incorrectly written as "its'") should be possessive, and shouldn't have the dangling apostrophe.
Is my TShirt worth big bucks now?
Just happened to be at the right place at the right time. I expect that will be my first and last 'first post' on /. ever.
WooHoo
The GTK port of XEmacs was funded through SourceXChange, I believe.
Can anyone else think of something worthwhile that was funded through it?
Dood, i don't know what your talking about. Hushmail.com works fine!
I don't really mind double posts on
I am the developer who won third place in the "Best Webapps Contest". While a lot of the winning entries didn't seem to be making much headway, my project was under active development.
I was to deliver 4 milestones to complete my project. The first was delivered in early December of last year and I have yet to receive the payment for this milestone yet. I was assured by John Egan of Collab.net as late as February 22, that I would be paid for it. I have a snowballs chance in hell of seeing that money now.
Milestone 2 was scheduled to be released in two weeks after being integrated into the Jive CVS repository.
Milestone 3 is to begin this weekend when I travel to work with Bill and Matt of CoolServlets to consult with them on the best way to include Moderation in the Jive codebase and integrate with existing Moderation code.
I still plan to do Milestone 4.
For those of you wondering what does the passing of SourceXchange mean for the Open Source world? Nothing. SourceXchange was more of a hinderance than a help to my project. They were supposed to supply every project (mine was #39) with a mailing list. The first time that I saw the SourceXchange mailing lists work was when Brian Behlendorf sent out the SourceXchange announcement that they were closing the doors.
From the letter:I certainly doubt that MyComponents.com feels that they got good results from SourceXchange. They got very little from the contest winners (myself included) and I am sure absolutely nothing that would benefit them as a business. If MyComponents made any payments to Collab.net, they should be asking for a refund.
The only good thing to come out of the whole "Best Webapps Contest" was that it inspired the First place winner Rickard Oberg to write WebWork.
And now sourceXchange. I noticed a lot of my favorite sites going down. Anyone know what happened to hushmail? I would love to know what happened to my mail :(
Wow, there is some serious weirdness going on then. I can't connect (even telnetting to port 80) at all from my speakeasy DSL to anywho or hushmail, but from my school's server works fine. I've been using these without trouble for months. I wonder if they're blocking speakeasy?
Thanks for telling me everything is ok.
I don't know if this means anything.
Collab.net still might be doing well. They were an ApacheCon sponsor so that at least takes some $.
However there were no collab.net employees (a lot are Apache developers) anywhere to be found. At least I didn't see any.
this is really unfortunate. i followed SourceXchange (and collab.net) pretty closely when i lived in San Francisco as i was good friends with employee number six. ;) it was a great idea, and it's a shame to see it go. i guess it just didn't generate the kind of noise it needed to, and didn't get the right people's attention.
the SourceXchange concept was a good one, and i honestly think a lot of companies (and the open source community) could have really benefited from the service. it also could have really helped legitimize open-source software. i know there were other services like it (like the Free Software Bazaar), but i think SourceXchange was the most appealing to big companies.
i wish Collab.net the best of luck with SourceCast, but while it looks like an interesting project, it really doesn't look like it will benefit open-source software nearly as much as SourceXchange could have. oh well, c'est la vie.
- j
I know I would be interested in hearing from people wanting to do this sort of thing.
It seems like everyone is blaming Collab.nets marketing for the failure of sourceXchange. I have been involved in two sXc projects, one as a developer, on as a peer reviewer. While the project I did as developer (RDBMS support for ArgoUML) went quite well in terms of speed, the second, where I was peer reviewer, was never really completed. Both projects were sponsored by Collab.net, so this was actually some kind of marketing, producing more active projects. But unfortunetaly I was the only one who was pushing these projects, there was little feedback and pressure from Collab.net as organizer (sXc) or Collab.net as sponsor. So in the end it was me as peer reviewer who kept the second project alive, since the developer himself was quite frustrated not getting feedback.
I really hoped that sXc would have been a success, and I am far from saying that it's all just Collab.nets fault, I admire them for their courage and power to try this. Please just don't say it's all just marketing failure, it would have needed more active developers and altogether a more active community.
This sig is stolen from someone who had a much better idea than I had.
And I always thought the spelling is "possessive" ...
SoftMaker Office for Windows|Linux|Android
No, the one I mentioned DOES have a dangling apostrophe. The possisive is "its" not "its'" with the extra apostrophe because "its" is, by nature, already possesive. You add the apostrophe when you have a noun that needs to be possesive, and you put it after an 's' when that noun is plural. Neither hold here as "its" is already a non-noun word and possisive!
Jesus, people, learn some English.
After reading the headlines earlier today about the sex business online, I read this as
Source Sex Change.. yikes.
For those interested in open-source game talks, check out http://stormbringer.sysconn.com/ or http://pcxl.n3.net/ for a new site that deals with opensource game news and development. -- Michael
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
Hey, if developers pf proprietary software want to use the same tools as developers of Open Source, that's fine with me.
SourceCast sounds similar to VA's SourceForge OnSite. Occasionally Larry McVoy talks about starting a similar "BitForge" project, too.
2 news stories down you say how online sub-cultures are booming, with open source being one of them. So uhh if it's booming why is sourcexchange closing down?
I wonder what, if anything, this will mean for GameXchange, the game project site that CollabNet built for Indrema.
The big subject of Indrema's dev chat yesterday was what to do with IDN and GameXchange if Indrema goes under. (Which they will unless they get more funding. They said they should know by the end of the week.)
. . .
OK, I know I'm going to be blasted for saying this, but this SourceCast product looks like it will be great for closed source efforts in startup software firms as well. More and more companies are having to hire people in disparate geographic regions (I'm a case in point), and source control is a freaking nightmare. Yes, it's already a nightmare if everyone is in-house, but raise it to the next order of magnitude for widely-distributed development.
While we're on this point, are there any other online resources that compare to the services that SourceCast is planning to offer?
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
You've still got the source code.
....
If it was a private firm with closed source code, you'd be having problems now.
Even if it was for code grouping, it's still not as bad as writing code for a closed source application language and having them go out of business
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
I have a friend that was working for collab.net in SF. I was down there doing something at Alexa.com and he mentioned that evening that they were going to shut down sourcexchange - mostly to streamline the company to go IPO. He hired someone to help collab.net do that, but he got fired today by that same person - never mentioned that would happen - in fact he was looking forward to the next year.
Cosource and SourceXchange both opened within a few months (days?) of each other. Both had a lot of promise. I would visit each one every few months, but the jobs on SourceXchange were too big and the process on Cosource WAY too complicated ("authority"? "affiliate"? Huh?).
This story reminded me to do my biannual check of Cosource and I find it just like I always do. And I mean that literally--the same projects are always just sitting there. Does anybody actually WORK on these things? I think that "FreeCiv to BeOS" thing has been there for two years or more.
These websites were great ideas but they don't seem to be working. Too bad.
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