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.
It doesn't appear Slashdot has much to do with the open source community lately either. If it really makes you sad, consider what blather makes headline on Slashdot. I don't mean this as a troll. I'm honestly disappointed over the last few months about drift on Slashdot too.
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.
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.
I can't see why a company may want to deploy sourceforge on site. Maybe I never worked for a big enough company but unless you have hundreds of projects I can't really see why one might one to have sourceforge in the office. Even when I worked for my biggest ever employer they had some sixteen distinct projects and that was a company with well over a thousand employees. Where's the selling point?
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
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
God, just take a dual PII-400 w/ 128mb of RAM running NT4/IIS/Exchange - and tie a rope to it. Tie it to sourceforge.
With an anchor like that - they'll never drift!
[Connection closed by foreign host]
I think it is a greate idea. That way, they can sell the software to corporations that are geared toward corporations, yet still run open sourced version just for the comunity. This way there an income from sales, advertisement & training through open source community. This is a win/win situation for company.
I wish more companies would do that.
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'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.
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
Their total revenue for the quarter was $15,981,000, while their Net Loss was $290,118,000. They lost 20 times what they made. That is simply pathetic. If they're going to come out of this, they've got to do a MAJOR turnaround, and as much as I'd like VA to succeed, I don't think selling SourceForge is going to make them 275 million a quarter. I feel bad for those who bought LNUX in the $300 range.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
I've never set up a network the size of SourceForge before, but what are the costs involved if you have a small, dedicated staff? Is is small enough that a government might be willing to help? I mean, free software is reaching a point where it can be considered a true public benefit. Can anyone think of governments that have given grants to this type of project in the past?
Last post!
Simply put, it will not be possible to sustain even a medium-sized software shop on a product such as SourceForge. On the low end you can get away with simply using CVS or CVSWeb, and on the high end I suspect customers will be suspicious of VA's long term (and even short term) viability.
VA simply has too much negative momentum at this point to save itself. While it is not their fault that the stock price was overvalued so greatly, they are nonetheless injured by the steep selloff. That coupled with a complete loss of vision at the company probably means the gig is up. I give them eighteen months.
But unfortunatly it seems that opensource can't survive buisness. People simply don't seem to be able to live on OS thay pizza man doesn't deliver in change of code.
Opensource workes when alot of people take some of thair free time to work with somkething thay can get use of and that thay think is fun working on. But then when thay have to go to work/school or gets bored thay must be able to jump off whithout the project droping dead, other people must be able to take it up. This is achived through well planed goals, beutiful code (comments and such) and systems like Sourceforge.
Then we get to the hardware problem. Can openness also be achived on hardware. Yes I think so. Opensource community should take a look at peer-to-peer community (pro:most people are the same already:o) to create an system for sharing bandwith and harddrivespace that has an interface like Sourceforge. Bandwith is brought by the community for the community. Then when companies like VA goes under the system will lose a heck lot of bandwith but it might still be there.
Both CmdrTaco and Hemos had some good words to say about all of this.
We have seen empires rise and fall in just a short while. We still have some time to see if the open source model will succeed or fail.
VA is doing what it needs to do to survive. This is a good_thing(tm) in my opinion. What is important is they are still giving back to the community. Such is most likely the future we will see. Large companies using and benefiting from those open source works and while be it their base product(s) may not be free in whole, they will provide some method to repay the community as they can.
There will never be one path that all places take. I'm certain there will be some organizations that will survive and profit by completely open source. There will also be those who give back in other means and there will be those will simply give.
Before you ask if corporate welfare is the right path to take, ask yourself what are the goals of many projects. A great deal of effort is to simply produce something others will use and the benefits of having someone else assist in this is definately in line with that idea.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Seems like the beer flowed pretty freely, alright. SF has been a great resource. A profit model wont save VA, but might plug a few leaks and let them float awhile longer. I also would be willing to pay a user membership fee in SourceForge. (Clearly, developers should get free access)
But asking for copyright from the developers of SF itself seems a bit, uh, misguided.
People, the problem here is not that everybody will feel bad about SourceForge (the site) containing non-free components; if you feel that it's OK and that it really doesn't matter then the FSF Europe article is not really aimed at you (well, it is in the sense that it tries to explain why it is a Bad Thing(tm)).
The problem here is with people that hosted their free software projects in SourceForge (and we all are in debt to VAfor that) not only because it was a very good platform to host a project on but also because it was free software... if the version of the software that is used on SF.net is not free software than it raises several problems for some people (myself included).
I hope this is not the case, but there seems to be a trend on releasing free software, make ppl use it extensively and then close the source when tested. I'm not saying that SF is one of those situations (VA maintains a free version AFAIK), but still, ppl are nowadays more aware of this kind of drifting, and that makes them suspicious.
People seem to forget that the FSF/FSFE view on things is pretty clear and documented... I don't know why people seem surprised when articles like that one are submitted. I for one totally stand behind Loïc's words, and share his concern.
Having one of the most known free software development centres running on a proprietary version of a platform isn't really very flatering for free software as a whole... 'see, they don't even use their free software to host their bloody code!'-type of comments come to mind.
fsmunoz
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's a very interesting idea. I'm just wondering how well development efforts can work without keeping the project somewhat centralized. Imagine for a moment a world where the Linux kernel doesn't have Linux and thousands of people are all releasing their own little patches to the code in a thousand different places. Seems like total chaos.
I do a lot of development using tools like CVS and even with a small team you can occasionally have problems with people forgetting to check in and causing conflicts. A massive web of people all working on their own tangents would turn that into utter chaos.
Seems like maybe the secret is some sort of very robust diff and dependancy tracking tool. If each patch could keep track of what patches it is dependant on, then when trying to apply a patch, it could inform you of dependancies it has an automatically get those patches. Of course I don't think this scales too well. If each patch has to keep track of patches it is dependent on then over time the patch files turn into huge lists of dependancies followed by a snippet of code.
I like the concept but I don't know if it's feasible...
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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 could swear at least until a month ago there used to be a 2.5 and 2.0 release avalailable.
Does anyone know where to get it now, and why they it's no longer on the project page?
---
WTF is an 'instant gratification war'?
Worse, VA will probably go out of business soon. I've been worried about this for some time. I run downside.com, and have a good record in predicting which dot-coms are going to tank. For some time, I've predicted that VA will tank. From an investor's perspective, that already happened, the stock is down over 99%. VA is still losing money and almost out of cash. Something very bad has to happen.
If there's no good backup, the failure of VA could take down much of the open source movement with it.
There's no guarantee that someone will want to buy VA at any price. Many, perhaps most, of the money-losing dot-coms that have gone under haven't been bought out; they've been liquidated outright. If the business model is a failure, buying into it at any price is a lose.
People I work with have been in contact with VA regarding deployment of SF Enterprise Edition...
The cost comes out to ~ $300K/year for 900 users... Not very economical, expecially considering I have an 80% functional install running off of the last (GPL'd) release - v2.61
my $.02
The open source utopia reminds me of "Das Kapital" by Karl Marx. It resultet in Communism, which is a great way of life, if it was at all possible. It's about everyone being happy and sharing (open source). But we know how North Korea is doing, do you remember Sovjet and Cuba? It's just as bad as depotism or the French monrachies before the revolution.
What you have to ask yourself if you would accept open source/communism ideas in your daily life. Do you want to slave 12 hours a day and have the same living standard as someone who is just playing around all day (I rather play all day myself, but nobody is paying me for that)? Think about it some, what is the purpose of free software really?
I think it's a good thing that vA can make some money, they need it, we all need more companies that makes money and gives us jobs and thus feeds us (most of us are involved, or will get involved, in the software business). As long as they give proper support and doesn't stop anyone else from doing a similar system.
Does this mean I hate all free software? Hell no, not at all. I love to see people doing all this work, having fun (the only reason to do something for free), sharing. It's great stuff, and to all who does that, my deepest thanks. If others can make buisiness out of your work it helps us all in these sad times. I just wish that those companies could be nice and send the authors a little gift or two.
I also don't have anything against closed source, as long as they give good support. A lot of very specialist software would never be made unless it was paid for. In some cases it would be no sense in keeping the source closed, in others it would be essential to survive as a business, both are needed.
So what is the bottom line? Jump down from your high horses and write lotsa software instead, do what it takes to make what you want, and make money in any way you can (but be nice) and have fun. Let the best software prevail, try new business models, never stop evolving. If one close sourced project can fund another open source project, isn't that a good thing?
VA's annual report makes much of the "quarter-million" developers currently using Source Forge - which it turns out are mostly the users of the public site. Since the public site is a great benefit for free software, what does it matter if Source Forge itself is free software? That's like saying, "I won't go to a church built of bricks, but only one built purely of faith." Would there be a point of having a second public Source Forge - say, the way there is a point in having slash/code clones? For what, Windows freeware? And is there any point in having Fortune 2000 companies be able to get the latest Source Forge free for their internal development efforts?
... what's not to like?
The current program: get large firms to pay for it, let the open community make wide use if it, use the open community's experience to help hone it and market it
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
If VA is in such dire straights, what would happen if VA goes under? Would they sell Slashdot to someone? What becomes of all of the personal information I've given here? What becomes of the vast amount of great, and not so great, commentary that has taken place here and is freely searchable? Should we be concerned?
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
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
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
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).
I see some posts from people who are basically asking, "What's the big deal? They're just doing what they need to survive."
The fuss is that for the last few years ESR et al has been CathedralBazaaring (if you'll pardon my verbization) this idea that Open Source software actually makes MORE economic sense than closed source software, because you get the benefits of the "community". Source Forge has basically rejected this idea, and said "screw this ivory tower theory, it's not working and we need to make money".
I'm not ready to declare the experiments a total failure. I believe Stronghold does pretty well with their commercial version of Apache (not sure though), and IBM is certainly putting a lot of effort toward open source. Of course, IBM is hoping to sell hardware, so it's not quite the same.
In fact, ESR has been pretty quiet lately. Considering he was a board member of VA, has he put out any opinions on this move to closed source? Has he resigned from the board?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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
29,000 projects are currently being hosted on Sourceforge. Okay, a lot of those are vaporware, but I think it's fair to say that there are at least a thousand interesting and valuable projects there. It would be a huge loss to the open-source community if all of these projects were suddenly homeless.
Sourceforge has done more to increase the sense of community among open-source developers than any other site. Whenever I want to find out if someone is developing source code that does something I want, where do I turn first - Freshmeat? Nope, Sourceforge, because it's so convenient and standardized. I know how to navigate Sourceforge quickly to download the latest release, browse the CVS archives, or check their bug reports - whereas all non-SF projects have these things in very different places, if at all (how many other projects have a working CVSWeb up and running - not many!). Hosting a project on Sourceforge makes it convenient for developers to examine what you're doing and join in, which is what makes open-source work.
I never would have joined if Sourceforge was not free, but if it came down to paying a subscription (in order to host a project there) or letting Sourceforge die, I would pay for it in a second. If they have to do this, it would be nice if they set up a system for micropayments - so grateful users could easily donate a couple of bucks to keep their favorite projects on Sourceforge.
Also, in talks with one of the sales droids at VA - They were asking for a signed NDA before they could discuss features/changes in the Enterprise Edition...
This may be different now that SF Enterprise Edition is out, but it strikes me as a bit fishy for a supposed open source company...
There is also no upgrade path from the 'free' versions that were available before to the new SF enterprise edition...
comments?
Chris DiBona
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
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.
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
From hearsay about a PostgreSQL to Oracle port, I previously assumed that it was just for SFEE at companies where they were already using Oracle. However, that job description really does look like a transition of sourceforge.net away from free software.
I see nothing in Pat McGovern's post denying such a transition.
Most ironic is the part at the end of the job listing: "A plus if you understand what the Open Source community is all about!"
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.
The following post isn't meant to be a flame. I'm just sharing what I knew to be true about my own experiences with VA regarding System 12, the embryonic form of what later became SourceForge. Hell, we even came up with the name "SourceForge" back in May of '99..
To quote from the article:
Finally, VA Linux[1] has become rather underhanded in their attempts to grasp exclusive control of contributors' work.
What sold VA on our idea, originally, was that the company was ultimately going to be in a position to assert a great amount of influence over the design of people's apps in the end. In the months prior to System 12's inception, I was asked by Trae McCombs to provide what amounted to a "proposal" he could hand to the people calling the shots, to justify setting up a box for us and others on the team to work with. The details of that proposal went something like this:
System 12 was going to offer "components"... Nice bits and pieces of graphics, sounds, and code that could be fused into pre-existing Linux apps, and perhaps more importantly, used to build new ones from scratch. The idea was to make the Linux developer community dependant upon System 12. Originally, the primary benefit of this was that all Linux apps would have had a similar behavior and appearance, and i'm sure we'd all agree that such a thing was good--But later, a more interesting benefit emerged, in that we (as System 12) and VA, as our parent, would be able to dictate how people were to develop their apps by controlling the components these apps relied upon. We didn't want to view the project that way -- Asserting control was a secondary benefit. VA viewed it as a primary benefit.
Needless to say, Management at VA apparently liked the idea. They liked it enough to set up a dual P3/500 with 50GB of space on it, sitting on a wide open T1. An enormous machine by 1999 standards.
Essentially, VA would have been able to express their desires as a company via your apps. To this day, VA views SourceForge as a tool to advance the interests of the company. Suppose your code relied upon a component provided by System 12. At any point, VA could alter the structure of that component so as to make your code behave nicely with VA-produced software (ala Internet Explorer & Word), or more amusingly, run a banner ad at the bottom of your apps. This was our idea, and its the idea we sold VA on. System 12, the base predecessor to SourceForge, was designed to exert a measure of control over the direction of Linux application development, SO AS TO BENEFIT THE COMPANY. We wanted to become powerful enough as a central development resource that VA would have some interest in hiring us on as permanent employees versus community volunteers. That never happened. We got shoved off the map before we knew what hit us.
Rather than letting us continue development, they essentially co-opted us, and put pre-existing VA employees on the task of developing the idea. "Grow the garden to attract the bunnies, then lock the gate to the garden and sell rabbit meat." The gate got locked a month or so ago when VA announced they're moving SourceForge into proprietary waters.. Soon, (if not already) VA will trying to co-opt those who participated in the garden. I tried to warn you guys, but nobody listened. I got called insane instead, for suggesting VA had something other than purely altruistic motives. I used to be just as big a flag waver as you when it came to VA, but I learned my lesson fairly early on in the game. I'm afraid the rest of you are just now getting a taste of the same lesson we learned.
To milk the community for the gain of the company was part of the plan from Day 1, folks.
You would be VERY wise to move your project and your work off of SourceForge as soon as possible.
Bowie J. Poag
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
I'm sensing two camps in the anti SF.net group
s /moorman/precision/etc/etc." This camp is riding off of the first group's complaints, and are promoting every Joe and his mother host their own full-service development setup. If these people think they can provide the excellent quality of service that is scalang like SF.net, then, well, go try it out. Most of us are extremely pleased with the QoS that SF.net gives us.
The first camp is the gung-ho FSF group, who are somehow complaining about SourceForge Enterprise edition even though it's not what drives SF.net, and about how VA is plotting behind everyone's back to keep Free software locked up. Note that only the original author is truly in this camp. This camp talks about there beeing Freener pastures over at Savannah. From Patric McGovern's replies, I hope that those listening to this camp realize that these accusations are unfounded.
The second camp is the "I don't like SourceForge because of its look/feel/security/bugtracking/forums/mailinglist
As a Free Software and Open Source advocate, I have not yet seen any legitimate accusations of SF.net, just FUD.
A few questions:
1) I thought the company was no longer "VA Linux Systems," as it had dropped the word "Linux" from its name?
2) From several articles written by Bowie J. Poag I gather than the founding of SourceForge was not quite so happy as you seem to indicate. His allegations are that VA requested that he work on such a project (at the time called system26), but that VA appropriated his work and turned it into sourceforge.
[For those who don't know, Bowie J. Poag is the main force behind Propaganda Desktop Graphics, which used to be the main feature of VA's themes.org until Mr. Poag deliberately destroyed the site in protest against VA's actions (it took VA about 6 months to put the site back together again, minus Propaganda, which is now at the new location linked to above).]
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
VA has been a powerhouse in the Linux community for some time. I hope they do what it takes to shed liabilities in order to get back in the black. As much as I hate to see them crop off open projects and open-source programmers, they have to do it in order to make it through these sad financial times.
I remember a day when VA Linux just sold hardware solutions.... if going back to that will save them then I'm all for it.
As for SourceForge, methinks it's a great idea... I hope it continues but only time will tell.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
You can have Libre while charging users for use of your code
/. again..(!)) and expect to have revenue to match faster than they could spend these kinds of budgets.
Well, this is the rub isnt it. I would suggest that once youve written the code for someone it is no longer 'yours'. The act of creation needs to be compensated (hence the real logic that software is a "service"). When you are finished with it it belongs to the person who funded it.
What we should hopefully see, is that customers will demand to recieve their freedom when buying software to bust out of the proprietary IT universe (where M$ stears the whole bit and you 'own' nothing)...
Once the users of technology own their freedom - mutal self interest will keep the tools open, innovation and usability will accelerate because there is no 're-inventing the wheel' in any new project - people are free to use the labours of others...
VA diving is unfortunate, and your suggestion to offer the hosting/managment/bandwidth etc as the service is a terrific idea... one that would have made sense had VA not been funded by capitalists looking to Get Rich Quick(TM)... Like QT, Cygwin and others, you CANNOT start with a massive budget and just buy yourself a viable business (for what its worth, i hate modern capitalism) - you really have to start slowly, build momentum and think "long term" versus the 30 second myopia of the DotBombs.
I mean really, who spends money like they did (what did VA pay for
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.
For this discussion let us assume that everybody's preference can be specified by a utility function. This is not as restrictive as it might appear initially, but to explain it would lead us far into game theory.
In game theory it is well known that the optimal strategy for individuals (Nash equilibrium) is often not optimal for society. By this we mean that there are other strategies under which everyone is better off. Unfortunately the optimal solution for the society is often not equilibrium if each individual optimizes his own gain.
This is where Capitalism works brilliantly. If people can exchange their possessions in a market place, they can choose better strategies by dividing the profit of the exchange among them. If all information is complete and if all exchanges are instant with zero cost, the market would be the perfect arbitor of every action in life. The fact that advertising is a big business proves that this is not the case.
Many of the remaining problems can be remedied by having laws and taxes and other instruments of govmnt that alters the payoff functions of individuals. Copyright is one such example where government force is used to change the payoff's of individuals, as it is deemed to be beneficial to the society. Developed societies are getting better at this throughout the past century.
At the time of Karl Marx, the situation was much worse. Some intellectuals thought that the cause of the discrepency between individual optimization and society optimization lies in the difference between the utility functions. They thought that if private properties were banned and if the society owned everything, then everyone would make their decision on what is good for all.
This would not work for many reasons. The major reason is that decisions are based on marginals (what you can change) instead of totals (what you already have). Even if everything is owned by society, working for one's own profit is still more profittable than working for society. So Communism could never ever be a working solution, even if it were established without all the other negative associations it has had attached in practice.
Now back to Free Software. The mechanism invented by RMS has nothing to do with removing private property. It is a mechanism for altering the dynamics of individual exchange imposed by copyright laws. It is less intrusive to the market place than the copyright laws themselves. It is believed to have the effect of encouraging behavior that would benefit the whole society.
What we have seen in the poor financial performance of many Open Source companies is an indication that the exchange mechanism is still not good enough to reward behavior that is good for the commons, assuming we agree that OSS is good on its own right. It is merely a reflection on the fact that Nash equilibrium is generally not global optimum, unless the exchange mechanism is fine tuned in a very clever way.
The following dichotomy is false: Suppose some one writes software that does not pay enough, then either
1. The software is useless, or
2. The society needs radical change like banning markets.
What history has shown is that the best progress are not those that force people to change or even abandon their utility functions, but evolutionary progress in the mechanism of exchange that results in payoff functions that tends towards global optimization.
To equate GPL with communism is either naive, ignorant or worse. It is no more valid than associating copyright or social security or national defense with communism.
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.
IMHO SourceForge is the most dynamic idea-platform for parsecs around, if not in the known universe.
Beginning this remarkable feat of hyperbole, this post sent my bullshit-o-meter off the scale.
What kind of fucked up moderator thinks this stuff is "insightful"? Is it because he has a project on Sourceforge and uses important-sounding words? Because he has more than two links in his post? Or is any and every post in favor of Sourceforge scheduled to be modded up, no matter how kooky?
Ye gods, follow his links. This guy's "Lebenswerk, or life-work" is apparently coding a full artificial intelligence. In Javascript. Ooookay. The interview and the "Theory of Mind" paper on his Sourceforge page (follow his links!) aren't the most floridly elaborate piece of pseudoscience I've ever read, but it comes close.
As such, it's perfectly valid and reasonable to say "this open source stuff isn't allowing me to compete in this capitalistic market!" The context would be something like SourceForge, since for industries less about software authoring, the "open source stuff" can still be a way to cut costs and own outright the means of data processing instead of renting it (say, from Microsoft.)
However, the problem comes when people don't even think to ask any of the other questions: foremost, I think, would be
Is this capitalistic market itself imposing power relationships on me that aren't to my interest?
THAT is the relevant question. Look at the big picture... look at the types of power relationships that exist among vendors, users, developers... it may be that Open Source never does make a sensible business model, but in a world where 'sensible business models' amount to serious power inequities between players and a Darwinian reduction of industries to only the most aggressive, restrictive players, is a business model really the thing to want? If that is the game (and with Microsoft being found repeatedly totally guilty of power abuses and wrist-slapped cautiously, I suggest it is), is it even proper to consider only how best to play that one particular game?
Microsoft knows what it's dealing with when it makes Open Source and the GPL in particular, public enemy number one. These are not effective economic weapons- they are effective specifically at breaking the hold a restrictive vendor exerts on its victims/developers/customers. If you can have ownership of your own software you can't be armtwisted- you are immune from power abuses.
This is in a context of business, again, and power abusers have the most effective business model IF most people are subject to their power. People using open source or developing it may never, ever have comparable economic power or competitive business models- but they can wield a 'spoiler' effect, allowing others to bail out of the proprietary sphere if it's getting too restrictive for them. This is what threatens Microsoft, not some notion that Red Hat will end up with a billion dollar war chest.
And it is right for this sort of thing to frighten power abusers- because it is in fact antithetical to their primary business model. If they were just selling service and quality and working hard it'd be another story- but the winning strategy has been to twist power relationships for all they're worth, and that is precisely what is threatened.
How does all this apply to VA and SourceForge?
Well- they have a choice, though it may be already made for them. They can go the one way- keeping open, and losing in the marketplace but enabling a wide spectrum of 'spoiler' projects that keep proprietary software in check. Otherwise each project will have to maintain its own web presence at its own expense, as I do (Mastering Tools). Or, they can roll the other direction, increasingly twisting power relationships to compete in the marketplace on the marketplace's own terms (even if those are set by hardcore libertarian ideology and best illustrated by Microsoft). If they do that, though, Free software itself is a threat to them, because it destabilises power relationships and makes it possible to avoid lock-in.
It sounds like they're doing the latter. Pity- I guess they felt they had to grow grow grow, to compete in the marketplace and maintain stock valuation. Unfortunately, for them to take this approach is antithetical to free software itself, so I would say they are fucked.
At no point do they ever have, or need, to sell it. That's not their business...
Step 1: Start an open-source based company
:)
Step 3: Profit!
Okay, how about doing this in true open source fashion from them folks. Just an idea, probably won't ever happen.
First off, what Sourceforge has today is a unique combination of services that nobody else I know of has. Sure you can buy web hosting and even FTP serving pretty cheap, but not with full cvs, bug tracking, and built in message boards. Certainly they also have the mind share out there as the place to host an open source project. For all the downsides, this should be a powerful combination.
In my mind, they should do everything they can to keep the tools used on that site open source. At the same time, they should be charging a nominal fee to those folks wishing to host their project there. Heck, it wouldn't have to be much. Figure it like this....
29,275 projects now hosted
$10/month for each project
$5/month additional for mailing list
$1/month for each person authorized to commit code to a project
Let's figure that they only retain 2/3'rds of the accounts in doing this. Of these, let's say about 1/3 add in some features of some sort. The mailing list thing was simply an example.
19,321 projects left
6,376 add in about $7 in features
$193,210 in hosting charges
$44,632 in feature charges
$237,842 total billable each month
$2,854,104 billable annually
This in my mind is a win win for everyone. Sourceforge charges a very reasonable fee for services, and they can show the project off as a profit center, all the while selling their proprietary version on the side. The dead projects that have long since lost developer interest vanish, or are picked up by someone else. Heck, if a project is truly interesting now we'd have a way to get non-developers involved by helping fund their hosting!
At this point though, Sourceforge is probably thinking that if they even charge a fee as low as $10/month they'd lose all the perty market share. I disagree, if for the unique services they provide alone. In order for this to play, those services and bandwidth need to keep themselves to very high standards.
I just know someone is going to find something wrong with my math
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
SourceForge (not SourceForge.net) is a collaborative software development platform.
SourceForge.net is a service provided freely to Open Source software development projects.
The new name SourceForge.net, and the logo with an enlarged dot and a "net" bigger in point size than the "FORGE", remind me too much of Microsoft .NET. Are you porting it to Mono or something? I would have called the code SourceForge Engine and the site SourceForge Projects in keeping with the general policy of following trademarks with a generic noun.
Will I retire or break 10K?
How the hell should the change in the name to Source[Forge].NET bring anything?
Perhaps some association with Microsoft, as I remarked earlier?
Will I retire or break 10K?
In that case make your own site to howst your own projects. What's the big deal?
War is necrophilia.
You missed my point that I like free software, it's a great thing. I just don't like elitism and forcefullness of it. The gnome list (sorry if I got this slightly wrong, but I remember it being gnome at least) can't even mention other software with RMS getting on their ass. This sounds a lot like Statsi/GRU/KGB/etc. So again, I love to see people share software, heck, I would probably do it too if I got myself to code something on my spare time. I am totally thrilled about KDE, but I don't see why free and company owned software can't live side by side.
I would effectivly loose 12 hours of my life, while you would do nothing. Would that be fair? I bet you that I rather stay with my girlfriend than do that. It was a general statement, don't spend too much time trying to come up with some case where I am wrong, instead try to figure out what I might have meant. Thinking is good, and opinions are good. I don't totally disagree with you, I just want to broaden the whole thing.
I still say the anology holds, if you go to the core of the issues. C, good idea, bad execution (I must stop using computing terms all the time...). I fear (and can be wrong) that "free software" could get the same development. Look at some of the exellent replies to my original post. Just take the issues with Emacs and who owns the rights to that... I want to see solutions where everyone wins, instead of the Bin Laden of software saying that there is only one true way.
I like the model with the linux kernel much more. This is the biggest thing Linus (Routsi rules;)) ever did. Everyone owns what they write. Simple right? So if there a large number of people owning different parts of something, who really owns it? It also (Linus explains this way better than I) something which makes it so that you have to give it away as well. Totally cool.
A very important point I made, which got no attention, is the we need all the small profitable companies we can get today. Part because of the bad economy, part to give Microsoft more competition. Heck, they want it, they are going to do their best to win, and I think everyone else should also do so.
About M$ (it's easier, and funny, to write it that way, that's the only reason I do). Yes, commie fear is wellspread in the states, but no, I am not playing into their hands. Isn't the problem that the american people needs to be educated on the world around them, and not that I used a fully valid anology?
The user buys? I never bought free software;) I have never thought the thought of getting linux any other way than via the net. So there are no buying happening there.
Technical quality. I'm a professional software engineer, I run XP legally, I love it. The best OS I've ever had. I would be totally surprised if others don't totally disagree with me, for different reason. There are more to this than technical reasons. And how should a person who is a specialist in something else know what the heck to buy? I must speak with lawyers, doctors, carpenters, as I don't know their fields. Software is sold the same way you sell shampoo or Star Trek. It's not special.
Whoo, that reply was WAY larger than I expected, to the few who read it, I hope it made you think, and to some extemt, disagree with me. Happy hacking everyone.
//J
Does Jesus advise you to badmouth other peoples volunteer efforts instead of pitching in to help? Perhaps you can ask him for advice next time. Say to him. Jesus is it right to critize the savannah project? Is it better for me to say bad things about them even if they are not true or to help them? Jesus should I start my own project where people with other licenses can host their own projects?
I bet Jesus can give you some good advice about these things. I am sure he cares deeply about software licenses.
War is necrophilia.
A couple of things.
1) You are a liar. Or maybe you are ignorant. Either way I don't think jesus would approve. The savannah project does not limit itself to GPLed products. They accept just about any open source licence. Your criticims are based on lies and ignorance.
2) If in reaction to the "stigma" of GPL or by your personal hatred of RMS (a man you probably have never met) you decide to write closed source software or software which does not somehow qualify for hosting on savanah keep this in mind. It's their fucking server, it's their fucking bandwith, it's their fucking software, it's their fucking labor and you are entitled to NONE of it. NONE. You hate them and yet you expect them to donate their money and time to you to make your life easier. I don't think so.
Here is my advice to you.
Get off your ass and build a server. Go write a great application which duplicated all or most of the sourceforge functions (sourceforge has the stigma of GPL remember). Then go buy some bandwidth and then invite people to host non GPLed software on it. Make sure RMS has never come close or breathed on any software hosted on your platform because you would not want that evil GPL mojo getting near your server. Then not only will jesus love you but you will have the right to point and crtitise the savannah project.
Until then shut up and sit down.
War is necrophilia.
" right, because nobody has the right to criticize in your wonderful utopia"
No just you. you don't have the right because you are an ignorant liar. I hope you see the difference between critism and lying.
BTW It's impossible to mock Jesus. Jesus does not exist. Some people think he exists even though there is no evidence for it. They claim that he is GOD ALMIGHTY ALL POWERFUL BEING THAT CREATED THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE. You think an entity like that cares about posts on slashdot? That's funny.
War is necrophilia.