Slashdot Mirror
SourceForge Drifting
Zocalo sent us a story running at FSF Europe talking about SourceForge's Drifting. Talks about the fact that they are releasing a closed-source version of the code commercially and various copyright related things. Obviously VA owns both SF and Slashdot so I'm skewed, but my personal opinion is that VA is doing what they need to do to make a buck while still providing the SourceForge.net website to the Open Source community. And I think their decision to sell a closed-source proprietary version of the code would be hypocritical, except that they aren't a 100% open-source company any more. And *that* is the part that makes me the most sad.
I would like to point out that despite what's said in the drifting piece - Sourceforge.net does run on Free software. Sourceforge 3.0 Enterprise Edition has non-free components to it, the major part being the access into Oracle.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
Unless the FSF is going to fund an open alternative to Source Forge they should get off their high horse.
As stated in the article, Savannah is such an alternative supported by thy FSF.
I'd love for VA to make available a usable enterprise version of Sourceforge...and is seems they finally have. I want to put one of these boxen up in my own outfit, but doing so with the free version of sf would have taken more time than my development project. Since we have a budget, I'll be more than happy to support VA and purchase SFEE when our project load gets high enough to justify the expenditure.
I just wish they'd lose the Oracle bit...I just can't see the need.
atrow - read the report. That's a declared loss. That's not cash. That's writing off the Andover.net acquisition, amongst other things that don't nvolved real money. Check out Nortel - 19 billion dollar write off.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
It's interesting, but for one of the open source projects I work on some of the developers are suggesting changing the license from BSD to GPL.
I am against this change, and find it interesting that nobody is worried about "appropriating" the contributors work and relicensing it with the GPL. Seems to me a bit hypocritical.
savanah.gnu.org
Basically it's Sourceforge but hosted and run by the GNU Project so it will always be free.
I'm having a hard time reconciling the Yahoo page with the Annual Report from October 19. The Yahoo financials report a non-recurring charge of $230,092,000 exactly in each of the four quarters. I believe this is an error. The annual loss is only $525,268,000 on $134,890,000 in revenues, whereas a quarterly loss of the size given would make for almost double that loss.
It does not appear that VA has any reason to expect continuing non-recurring expenses in the quarter-billion range per quarter. It appears that they have already paid their non-recurring expenses for goodwill from unfortunate acquisitions and from reorganization.
What's happening to SourceForge is more interesting in how it bears on the overall health of the open source and free software movement. Rather than repeating myself, I'd like to refer to this post, which suggests that we may be looking at a world where free software is relatively crippled compared to proprietary versions of the same software.
Tim
Uh, no.
May I suggest youread about the history of BSD? And the GNU project?
Set the wayback machine for the 1970s, when it was highly likely the programs came with source, and it was normal for programmers to (gasp!) share ideas and help each other. Take a look at how much software has come out of publically funded universities and research groups. A lot of free and open source software has come, and continues to come from, people who get paid for it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
However, the overall picture is still grim. Looking at the cash flow from operating activities (minus 19M) and the current assets-current liabilities (97M - 33M) of 64M means about 3 quarters more before LNUX runs out of cash, assuming that the company gets no more financing. These are not numbers to warm a skeptic's heart. I like Slashdot/SF/etc as much as the next guy, but I'd update my resume if I were you.
I would say that VA has it's problems. Like any .bomb company in the last 5 years, they grew too big and too fast for their own good. The bean counters sit down and take a look at what they have and realize that a site like SF hosting almost 30,000 projects and supporting almost 300,000 users isn't making any money. Really? Wow. What a revelation.
/.?) might be affected by the VA fallout. Let's face it, they hurting in the financial area and I'm sure that's not helping morale. I doubt they're sitting in board rooms saying "We'll support open source even if it kills us". No. If the boat begins to sink, the first thing to pull is SF. I mean, how much bandwidth and server space can it be taking up?
Good for them to fork a version of their system and build a corporate version and good for them to those that purchase it. However, I doubt that even that is going to help their bottom line much. While the service is something useful for a collaboration based methodology in the corporate environment, it'll be a hard sell to companies that are already hooked into high priced alternatives like LiveLink, etc.
What I am concerned about is that SF (and perhaps
I am concerned as a developer because I host a half dozen or so projects on SF and to see them vanish would be a little devastating. My advice for anyone who uses them, mirror your projects and don't subscribe to the "all your eggs in one basket" theory.
liB
My name is Patrick McGovern and I manage SourceForge.net. I wanted
to take a moment to address the issues that Loic raised in his
recent article.
As a background: SourceForge.net is a website within the
Open Source Developers Network (OSDN), owned by VA Linux Systems.
SourceForge.net provides free hosting for Open Source software
development projects via its web site at http://sourceforge.net
and http://sf.net
SourceForge.net, OSDN and VA Linux systems are committed to the
Open Source community. Two years ago (almost to the day)
SourceForge.net was started to provide a way for Open Source
developers to collaborate with each other and make great software.
This mission has not changed. Today VA spends a tremendous amount
of money and resources to provide excellent service to 30,000 projects.
Loic brings up a number of points that are simply not accurate.
* SourceForge (not SourceForge.net) is a collaborative software
development platform. The SourceForge software originated as the
foundation of the SourceForge.net service, and is now the basis of
a number of products offered by VA Linux Systems. SourceForge
Enterprise Edition is the commercial product released by
VA Linux Systems last week. SourceForge is a software platform.
* SourceForge.net is a service provided freely to Open Source
software development projects. SourceForge.net is not running
the SourceForge Enterprise Edition software. SourceForge.net is
a web site, which provides a service to the Open Source community.
* SourceForge.net provides free hosting for Open Source Software
development projects. SourceForge.net is not now, or nor has it
ever been, exclusive to free software -- we accept hosting requests
from projects licensed under any OSI-approved Open Source License,
and projects whose licenses have not been directly approved,
but comply with the OSI Open Source Definition.
* Data Export: The ability to export data from SourceForge.net
has not changed. There is no conspiracy to 'lock projects in'
to SourceForge.net. Every project has the ability to download
a nightly tarball of their CVS code. If people have any concerns
about their code, we recommend they set up a cron job to download
the latest version. Eight months ago we did have a XML API that
allowed project admins to download bug report data. The API broke
earlier in the year when we enhanced the SF.NET code (version 2.5)
to include the tracker (a tool that unifies all 'ticket-related'
systems). Until recently, we didn't receive a lot of interest from
the community to re-introduce the feature... so we have been focusing
on other aspects of the site. We are now re-examining the issue.
In the mean time, there are third-party programs which will collect
the content directly from the site and extract that data.
* Mailing Lists: One area we concentrating on, which Loic alludes to,
is mailing list archives. This, historically, has been one of the
weakest areas of SourceForge.net. We are currently working on a new
solution, which directly integrates the mailing lists with
SourceForge.net, as opposed to Geocrawler. We have just entered the
initial beta phase for this project. It is still being worked on,
but you can see it here in action:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=27464 (look at the last
four forums). We are essentially using the SourceForge Forum code;
the same code base that has been available to the community for
some time.
--
Developers are choosing SourceForge.net because of the excellent
resources and service we give the community. The site is currently
growing at over 60 new projects and 700 developers a day. We just
added new personnel and purchased 70 new servers to make sure we
retain our excellent quality of service. We have added new download
servers to make sure the community can get Source code as fast
as possible. We have been adding additional hardware to
the compile farm. (OS X systems were added last month).
Finally, SourceForge.net is a free service. It's a service I believe
greatly enhances the Open Source Developer's ability to write and
release great software; and have it seen by a lot of people. If you
feel that SourceForge.net is not for you, that is okay too. There are
alternatives out there, and it's better to host your code where you
think you will be the most productive.
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to write me:
pat at sourceforge.net
Thank you,
Pat-
Patrick McGovern
email: Pat at SourceForge.net
Director, SourceForge.net
I'm running a SF hosted projected for nearly a year now, and I can say that tech support has largely dropped the last months. I'm waiting already since june to be able to create my projectname-cvs mailling list, I've already downloaded their PHP source and pointed them at the bug line... no success :( However one cannot really complain about a free service.
But after all it's still fantastic, a free web server, a CVS server, mailling lists, forums, bug trackers, with CRON jobs! Additionally it's the only free service I know of that allows me to upload and execute CGI scripts on their servers. Even if setting this all up at your home machine with a (very week) permanent connection would take you weeks. Beside I like to turn of my machine in the night because of the noise. Not to mention what a dedicated server would cost, then free programming is suddendly an expensive hobby.
From my past experience in industry one somehow smells struggling demises. How the hell should the change in the name to Source.NET bring anything? just anything? This just reminds me of dilberts pointy-hair bosses.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
The parent post is a shill for Microsoft. Freedomtoinnovate.net had a booth at the Microsoft shareholder meeting. Basicly, Distributedcopyright.org is just Microsoft's Shared-Source(TM) painted with a bit of gloss. I don't think Microsoft is actually serious about Shared-Source(TM), they just want to distract free-software developers. And as Balmer says, it's all about the Developers,Developers,Developers.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
You may want to link the original article posted in Advogato: here.
FSFE is providing also French and German versions with other translations (Spanish/Portugese/Italian) in the way.
> Many forget how immensely wealthy IBM is still
1 .h tm
Yep, revenue over 3 times Microsoft's.
http://www.microsoft.com/msft/earnings/FY01/q40
"Microsoft Corp. today announced revenue of $25.30 billion for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2001"
http://www.ibm.com/investor/data/irdacf.phtml
"Annual Results: Revenue (in millions): 2000 Year End: $88,396"
rant