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.
Step 1: Start an open-source based company
Step 3: Profit!
Apparently Step 2 is "completely change the business model of this corporation so that it may actually make money."
Bitter pill to swallow, but giving away IP just doesn't work.
Thanks for the correction, VA Linux have done lots of good deeds to the linux community so far, for them to survivie they have to thread carefully nowdays, So they have every excuse to survive, as that only means good to the free software community at the end
#include #include return (0);
Considering that no one is exactly sure if VA can make it as a business selling proprietary extensions to Source Forge has anyone thought about what will happen to Freshmeat and Source Forge if (or is it when) VA goes under?
I know that a couple of projects have started mirroring their Source Forge content in case anything happens but are there any credible replacements being worked in case both these extremely useful sites lose their their parent company? Specifically are there any sites that are viable replacements to either Freshmeat or SourceForge? Currently we have multiple Linux distros so the death of one, two or more companies in that area would be sad but not devastating on the other hand the dissappearance of VA considering how much of a central repository for Open Source apps SourceForge and Freshmeat have become would be devastating.
If people out there take serious issue with Source Forge's turn to the proprietary, then take the last release of open source code and start your own Source Forge. I mean isn't that supposed to be one of the magical things about open source, that folks who want to go proprietary cannot because the community will hijack it.
Of course if you want to set up your own Source fFrge you have to have the money to run all of the servers, bandwidth, etc. Don't have the cash? Well I guess that's what Source Forge was running into as well.
Personally I think that Source Forge being open source itself was cool but rather secondary to the fact that source forge provides a great place for people to collaborate on projects. If they have to close the source to make it financially feasible to continue to provide the service, so be it. Which would be worse for the community: Source Forge running on proprietary software or Source Forge shutting down?
Unless the FSF is going to fund an open alternative to Source Forge they should get off their high horse.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Note that the FSF, which does like all things free, is more concerned about the possible GNU GPL violations that might be occuring, and "appropriation" of contributors' work. While I'm not an GPL-junkie, this does seem to be a valid point from the FSF, with SF walking a thin, grey line.
I am not going to say it is unfortunate that this about money. I work in the medical field and I not going to say that making money off of treating people is wrong because I have see what happens when you get healthcare for free.
I think that we are seeing a serious progression from the idea of "free" as in "free beer, just keep tapping the never-ending keg" and move more to the idea of OpenSource. The Source and How it works is there and you can, with enough motivation, change it.
I've already read one post that likened like a very expensive gift to the OpenSource community, and expensive means money. And When I mean money and mean YOUR money, and MY money is what it is going to take. (I plan donating money to openprojects.org as soon as they start taking donations again).
I think that VA really did spend an enormouse amount of money on this community and while we shouldnt necessarily start paying them for it, we should really realize that this philosophy will require real sacrifice (YOUR MONEY) and I believe that will be a Good Thing. As we get older, a lot of us will start making money and be able to meaninfully contribute and support a cause that we are proud of, and I think that is really neat.
anyway, Sorry for rambling and thank you for reading
Sigs are dangerous coy things
This is getting completely out of hand, from the GNU/Linux thing (what else is that if not an attempt to control your own idea?) to the willfull exclusion of users who need or want to run binary kernel modules. Bah.
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
We often sit here on our high-horses looking down our noses at non-free software... but think about it for a second. With the exception of RedHat, how many companies based on open-source software have managed to be profitable? I know I haven't really heard of any. You can not make money off of software you give away... you need to provide some additional service or product that you can't just get off the net for the cost of several hours of downloading.
Free is all well-and-good... and it works for people doing smaller projects on their free time, where they're not expending millions of dollars on development, equipment, network maintenance, high speed connections and all the other expenses a company like VA has.
I support the free software movement and community... I think it's a great effort and may someday prove to be viable economically, but in today's market it really doesn't work.
If close-sourcing SF and selling it commercially is one of the things VA has to do to make some money to continue to provide us with the resources we take for granted (OSDN, Slashdot, Freshmeat, ThinkGeek etc...), then I say let them do it. Still got a bee up your bonnett? Then take the 2.5 code and refine it and deploy your own system for project management. Don't attack a company for doing what it needs to do to stay alive.
-Z
After visitng linuxworld and drilling their sales reps we came to the conclusion that Sourceforge can't compete with free alternatives. (by 'we' I mean the software Co. I'm working for)
Bugzilla/bonsai/tinderbox provides a more complete solution. We were even able to modify the trio to deal with java, our many different build scripts (make is rather lacking for java), and our test automation.
What we found was that Sourceforge provided discussion groups which we got using exchange or INND, bug tracking which wasn't nearly as feature rich as bugzilla, and cvs integration which bonsai provided just as well. It was still lacking the automated builds, and by the time they got back to us after linuxworld we had allready deployed the bugzilla solution (partly thanks to some nice debian packages put together by Remi Perrot).
One large drawback is that bonsai relies on glimpse as its fulltext indexer. Glimpse used to be free but since then has gone commercial. We were, however, able to find some old glimpse source (which may have been GPL or artistic license - perhaps we should redistribute the old code as GNUlimpse).
We have made our own tweaks to bugzilla/tinderbox/bonsai and contributed a few of them back to the mozilla developers (in the future probably all will be recycled into the public implementation).
That's just it - They _were_ using mysql, but I think they moved to postgres since it could "scale better"...
So, let them sell their system with proprietary extensions. It doesn't affect the GPL version ( hey, maybe those extensions will *sometime* be GPLed also ). It allows them to keep running the site.
But, here are a couple of sugestions to them, if they care.
So, them you allow people to give donations to their favorite projects. Anyone could give 1 buck to their favorite project or even pay the 5 bucks and that project would be hosted nicely for 3 months. Just another way to get some bucks.
If no users give some donation, them the developers would pay the bucks that are missing.
But of course, you should allways keep implementing new stuff on the system, specially those that now are being selled as proprietary extensions.
If the system sounds sexy enough, people will go for the payment/donations.
The biggest projects wich have biggest "fans" also have biggest bandwitdh waste, so people would not mind paying some bucks for it. I guess.
I'm not the first to mention it, but this bears repeating: this isn't a sign of VA * abandoning their ideals; they are doing the best under the circumstances. It's really a sign of them struggling for their lives in a hostile environment.
The recently posted their quarterly income statement, and my analysis is that it looks very bad. They posted a net profit of negative $290 million. Most of that is imaginary money, so let's look at the rest of the figures to get an idea what is actually going on.
To project the long term viability of the company, we will look at the burn rate, and try to extend that against their short term assets, accounting for any factors that will change their revenues or expenses.
The balance sheet shows that their current assets continue to drop. Particularly disturbing is the continued drop in cash and equivalents and short term investments. These have gone down by about $17 million, indicating that as their burn rate. Inventory has also decreased, presumably as they sell off what remains from their hardware business. This provides a revenue stream that has basically finished this quarter. Since the $8 million drop there is about half of the total revenue, we can expect revenue next quarter to be about half of what it was this quarter.
Long term assets are also dropping. Reductions in long term capital are likely due to exiting the hardware business and getting rid of associated facilities. They are also writing off huge amounts of goodwill and intangibles. Neither of these is important, since the money was already spent and does not affect their long term viability. The only thing to note is that the poor economy now means that the money spent acquiring these assets is not giving much of a return, and they would have been better just sticking it in the bank.
Although their liabilities are increasing, they do not explain why, categorizing the increase as "other liabilities". We can't factor this into any calculations directly.
It appears that the current burn rate is $17 million per quarter, against reserves of about $97 million. With revenues expected to fall to half of the $16 million they are now once the remaining hardware inventory is sold, we expect the burn rate to increase to $25 million. At this rate we can expect the company to survive four quarters, just one year.
In that time frame, there really isn't anything that we can expect to make them viable. Revenues from SourceForge On Site will likely ramp up, but that will be a slow process that can not offset much of the projected loss. Further, aggressive cost cutting measures will reduce the burn rate, but it is unlikely they can cut it enough to survive long, particularly with the conflicting goal of building the SourceForge brand and ramping development and sales.
I really don't see a future for VA. Look for them to sell off unprofitable assets (likely including Slashdot, unless the changes Rob discussed can make it profitable). Developers with projects on SourceForge should make offsite backups just in case they remove it suddenly and don't give developers sufficient time to withdraw their code. Think also what the rush on the site will be when they announce its closing and everybody tries to checkout their projects at the same time.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
IMHO SourceForge is the most dynamic idea-platform for parsecs around, if not in the known universe.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mind has become the main focus of my Lebenswerk or life-work since 18 July 2001 when the AI Mind project was cleared on SourceForge for go-ahead to the coming Technological Singularity.
As of this morning on Mon.12.NOV.2001, there were 369 Open Source projects in Artificial Intelligence on SourceForge. In my self-appointed but arguably well-deserved role as a purveyor of AI theory (see Nanomagazine interview), very truly yours Mentifex here has been working to draw all the AI projects together under a common theory-umbrella -- not forcing the Mentifex theory down anybody's throat, but offering the Theory of Mind as something to react against and improve upon. Just today the Mind-to-C liaison page was updated with links to some of the pre-eminent AI-in-C projects on SourceForge.
If SourceForge were to fail, it would be a sad day for the future of all humanity.
The game Hattrick (www.hattrick.ws) is a free game where you could "support" the game by buying a little extra statistics and the ability to monitor other teams. It won't give you any advantages, but it's a way to show that you enjoy the game and want to support it.
Couldn't a similar model work for sf.net? I know I would pay a (modest) fee for the great service they provide.
That being said, I think that taking someones contributed code and put it into your own propriatary version and sell it is not very nice. It's profiting on someone elses work.
Haeger
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
So it's a service, not a software. That's interesting, because it implies that VA won't make its source code available, as a service doesn't have any source code. It is based on a software, but you didn't say that you'll continue to make its source code available as free software.
So I assume that the SourceForge software will become proprietary. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Read the FSF website some day -- free software does not refer to GPL only, it's basically a different term for open source (with some philosophical differences). E.g. the BSD license is an open source license as well as a free software license, but it is not "copyleft." I guess about 40% of the projects hosted by SF are free software, or open source, whichever term you prefer. (The other 60% are status 1, planning.)
The more interesting question is, will they continue to do so?
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
That's assuming IP even exists.
There is only copyright, mark, and patent law. IP is a misnomer, a hypocrisy, and a deliberate lie.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Is this capitalistic market itself imposing power relationships on me that aren't to my interest?
I think that question is where people like you and RMS go wrong. You make the assumption that people don't factor that in, and you are wrong. It's not phrased that way, but it's basically the same question as "does the licensing agreement provide the benefits compared to the cost, and compared to other solutions?"
What is also very telling is your use of "foremost" with respect to this question. I understand that to RMS and perhaps you this is a foremost question, but it is NOT the foremost question to most people, and it shouldn't be. Here's the foremost question: What is the best solution to my problem that maximizes benefit versus cost? The fact that a product might have "freedom" as a benefit is valuable in some cases, and worthless is others.
Personally, I use Linux as a server for one of my web sites. It made sense, because of the relatively low cost and availability of software. On the other hand, I am typing this on a Win2K system using pretty much all proprietary software, like Exceed, Office, etc. I use them because they are the best software for my needs, and the cost to me is well worth the benefit. The fact that I don't have source code for Exceed or Office is totally irrelevent to me.
I guess my point is that if you and the OSS community are waiting for the masses to "wake up" to the advantages of "freedom", you will have a long wait. On the other hand, if the OSS community produces software that is at least equivalent to the proprietary solutions, then they will get somewhere.
So far, we see OSS playing catch-up in almost all software categories, except a notable few. Is this just a question of time, or is it intrinsic to OSS? I don't know for sure, but it's entirely possible that it's intrinsic to OSS. Usually the way an OSS project happens is that some programmers sees a proprietary program that they like, and decide to implement a "poor man's" version of it. People add to it, until it becomes relatively usable. In other words, innovation generally takes place in the proprietary sector. So far, this has been the story of almost every OSS project. It will be interesting to see if it continues.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.