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.
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