Slashdot Mirror
SourceForge's Hottest Five Apps
davidmwilliams points us to his story up on IT Wire about the top five most active open source projects on SourceForge. (Sourceforge.net and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge Inc.) He writes, "It explains what they do and why they're useful. Most of these will be new to most people but all are definitely bursting with potential."
Site traffic obviously....
Wonder what percentage of the software downloaded via OSS P2P is actually Open Source itself?
I guess you wouldn't necessarily need to download software via P2P if it was actually free to begin with.
Granted, it is a smaller percentage, but in the case of Bittorrent it is being used more and more for legitimate software downloads. Bittorrent is really just another file transfer protocol that happens to be P2P. I download a lot of larger open source apps via P2P when I can because its generally faster, especially for new releases. Podcasts, especially video podcasts, are especially good to use Bittorrent for. Since it is subscription based, you have huge swarms trying to download the podcast at once, so Bittorrent is especially effective in that case.
#!/
Before trashing the article, read it. The very azureus you complain wasn't mentioned, was the #1 hottest project.
RTFA, DA.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
"I guess you wouldn't necessarily need to download software via P2P if it was actually free to begin with."
Actually yes you do. Things like Linux ISOs are BIG. And not every distribution has the luxury of deep pockets for band width.
Even distros like Fedora offer torrents of the ISOs the save bandwidth and to speed up downloads.
I have only used bit torrent to download Linux ISOs.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
For me Datamations list was much more interesting since they spend time digging up new and upcoming projects I did not know about like kdenlive (kind of like the Diva video editor, but not a dead project). http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/ 3678071
The one program I always download from SF is filezilla (client) and recently I set up the server version to replace the broken default IIS FTP server.
Both client and server are working great, highly recommended free open source FTP client and server.
The problem is you can't cancel projects. I know I've got a few projects on SourceForge that I never intend to do anything with. One of them even has some code.
In any case, I've long since lost both the password for that SourceForge account and no longer have access to the email address I used to create it, so those projects will remain forever, clogging up SourceForge despite the fact that they're long dead.
I don't think SourceForge should just delete dead projects, but it would be nice if they'd move them into a "SourceForge Archive" or something after a project fails to see any activity or downloads for, say, a year. Leave them accessible, but stop returning them in searches unless a "search archives" option is set.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Well there is: "Development Status : 7 - Inactive".
This is probably exactly what you are searching for.
(Won't help you with your login though...)
I recently started a project over at sourceforge and I think that what they provide is really great. They give you all kinds of features like forums, news, trackers, and web site statistics via RSS. They will host a web site to promote your project. That hosting includes the ability to run a web application written in perl and access to your own database on a MySql server. With that much capability, I implemented the project web site using the source code of the project itself.
You also get ssh, sftp, and cvs (via ssh) access. I haven't run into any problems with updating the content. There is a web interface for downloading code but you have to use cvs for uploading. I don't know what problem the original poster was running into but I found no difficulties with it.
Actually, last February, SourceForge implemented a policy to reduce the number of dead projects. It works something like this. When a project has no activity at all for (something like) 6 months, a notice is sent to the developer(s). I think they have something like 30 days to respond to keep the project active. Beyond that it is removed from the actual database but can be reinstated upon request for a certain period of time. Beyond that time the project is permanently deleted. (Note: I'm pretty sure I saw actual numbers like these stated somewhere in a bulletin or article or something, but I can't find it. Here is something pulled from SF: )
2006-07
Major Changes and Enhancements:
* The SourceForge.net Engineering team added a site feature, allowing projects to reference an externally hosted Subversion repository from the Subversion link on the project summary page. The end-goal is to provide a similar setting for the other site tools allowing the single landing page to point to all major project resources, hosted at SourceForge.net or not.
* The SourceForge.net Engineering team added a tool to allow a user to remove their user account without the need to request removal from Support. This new tool can be accessed from your SourceForge.net Account page.
* The SourceForge.net Engineering team added a private flag to Tracker. This allows projects or users to flag their tracker items as private, keeping the data between the submitter and the project's Tracker Editors.
* The SourceForge.net Service Operations Group upgraded ViewVC for both Subversion and CVS services to the latest version, 1.0.1. This upgrade, along with a few functional changes, should greatly improve the availability of ViewVC for the Subversion service.
* The SourceForge.net Service Operations Group finished an initial run of the Project Autopurge System, removing all projects in a deleted status, and inactive projects that released no source and whose administrators didn't opt-out of the process. This should increase the pool of names available for projects and reduce the number of inactive projects on SourceForge.net.
If the project has no other members and no code, or nothing other than the initial CVS check-in, they will delete a project if asked. I've done it.
Of course if you can't log in to do so, then their reasons for not deleting the project are pretty obvious. At any rate, SourceForget's searching and browsing completely sucks, and their activity measurement metric isn't very good either. You get what you pay for I guess.
Sorry, but your spreading incorrect information here:
First of, it *is* possible to cancel projects. In the admin section, there is a whole section dedicated specifically to "Project Removal". In addition, you can takeover existing orphaned projects, there is a support document explaining how.
Secondly: If you lost your password or do not have access to your old email address anymore: They have a whole support document dealing just with that topic, too: .
Finally, projects which never made any code releases and have no other "real" data etc. are automtaically purged after some time. In addition they even undertook a big effort 1-2 years ago to mark and "delete" empty projects (with lots of fail safes, asking all project members whether the project is really dead etc. etc.) -- it still produced a cry of outrage over here on slashdot... The usual double standards seem to apply here :-/