Inside the Open Source Lab
FreeFooOpenFighter writes "KernelTrap has an interesting article about Oregon State University's Open Source Lab. They currently provide hosting for an impressive list of projects including, among many others, the Mozilla Foundation, Debian GNU/Linux, and Gentoo Linux. According to the informative article, they plan to continue to donate hosting with their two OC48s to FOSS projects meeting their criteria."
My only real beef in that regard, is that SF.net is not Open Source at all. Their code isn't Open Source, their formats are not Open Source, and they are wholly a 100% proprietary entity. They're just using the OSS community to get them visibility with corporate sponsors.
One of my former colleagues used to work for them. When they released 1.0 of the proprietary SF.net codebase, all of the developers were immediately fired. It was like "Thanks for helping us reach this wonderful milestone. Now we can become profitable. You're all fired."
You can't even download the last version of their OSS code and use it to run your own version of a version control hosting solution. If you wanted to migrate away from SF.net and export your projects, bugs, files, etc. you can't... because there's nothing else out there to import that data into. Its just like Microsoft documents... once you get your data in, you can't get it back out.
That also doesn't take into account how many things they've crippled in the name of "security" there. Mailman (no mbox downloads, no search, no offline use of archives), cvs (no deletions, no branches), etc.
Pitiful.