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Tim Perdue on GForge & Building SourceForge

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the walk-down-memory-lane dept.

Steve Mallett writes "I've just posted an interview I did with Tim Perdue, former co-'head honcho' responsible for developing SourceForge. You'll either love it or hate the interview, but it's on his new project GForge, a fork of the previously open source code running SF, while he shares some insight in what seems like a miracle that SourceForge was built at all." Obviously Slashdot's parent runs SourceForge, so insert whatever mental disclaimer and conspiracy theory you want here.

7 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Re:WTF? by ryants · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Already???? Well, no offence to Tim, but it's got some way to go before it's SourceForge scale ;)
    While I realise this was meant to be homour, by way of info gforge.org is not going to be the next SF... gforge.org has 1 project, and that is GForge itself.

    Before it got /.-ed, Tim had posted something to the effect that "Ripped out lots of hacks and ugly code, as GForge doesn't need to scale to 500,000 users".

    GForge is meant more for people to use internally and has some very cool (planned) features that I'm looking forward to (and looking forward to helping out with, if I can), such as:

    • Jabber support
    • "Detachable" client (take your bugs with you on your Palm Pilot)
    • Gantt charts for the Task tracker
    • ... bunch of other stuff I can't remember and which I could look up, were it not for the /.-ing
    --

    Ryan T. Sammartino
    "Ancora imparo"

  2. fucking tim... by edrugtrader · · Score: 2, Interesting

    he also ran phpbuilder.com... many interesting articles and a lively helpful forum. then he sold that and it went to shit. i went from a newbie on there to one of the most helpful and knowledgable posters, to just another coder that abondoned it.

    --
    MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
  3. GPL-comatible php3 instead of php4? by Adam+J.+Richter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The web page implies that gforge requires php4, which, last I checked, contained and required the GPL-incompatible zend "engine." Does anyone know how much work would be involved in porting gforge to (GPL compatible) php3?

  4. So such oragnisations can get something out ??? by pruneau · · Score: 2, Interesting
    When I read Tim interview, it really brings me back some years ago when I was working in some small company.

    The CEO/owner wanted to develop something, only to change the target every second week.

    Of course, since this guy was lacking any kind of vision, he was adopting a different development Guru every third month, with the usual political back-stabbing going on.

    And since the project has some targetting problems, obtaining the hardware was of course a pain in ...

    I learned what I could learn, then went out.

    I guess that when such an organisation is successfull as producing software, it's because the developper have a really good idea, and they are left alone by the various PHB.

    --
    [Pruneau /\o^O/\ warranty void if this .sig is removed]
  5. Why is VA not releasing code? by gsfprez · · Score: 3, Interesting

    from the website:
    >Since VA has not released the source in over one year, despite their promises to the contrary, a fork was necessary to ensure a viable open source version of the codebase.
    >
    so i went over to the site in question (sourceforge.net) and was unable to determine anything about the software which is used to run SF.

    So... does Tim have a legit beef? I do not know the history of SF.net enough to know. Is the sf.net code open? Is it VA or OSDN owned? Is it proprietary?

    just curious.

    It just seemed out of the norm since they've been pretty good about slashcode and all....

    --
    guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
  6. Sharp Launched their SourceForge Today by perlow · · Score: 5, Interesting

    On a related note, Sharp Electronics launched ZAURUS.COM today, which includes a Sourceforge 2.5 based custom implementation designed by Tony Guntharp, Tim Purdue's colleague in the original SourceForge project.

  7. Re:Paying for sourceforge? Raise your hand. by SmilingMonk · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Why pay for SourceForge? Or Collab.net, for that matter.

    We downloaded the last snapshot of what was to become SourceForge v2.6, fixed it, enhanced it (still are, in fact), deployed it, servicing over 700 people, and kept it alive for over 300 continous days with no interruptions.

    Cost? One engineer 3/4 time and a small rackmount server attached to a bunch of filers.

    Oh, and we got Unicode working so that we can engage our Japanese and Chinese business partners in their native languages. Sanskrit anyone?

    Great stuff, this! We look forward to contributing back to GForge and taking advantage of the fun things they appear ready to deliver.