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."

Comments

Well this is stupid

[The Real Toad King]

All they did was take the most active projects this week and commented on them.

What was the point in this?

Re:Well this is stupid

[devilspgd]

Its kind of like doing a music chart by looking at who's spending the most time in the studio (or maybe who's smashing up the most hotel rooms?). Would that be better or worse then basing it on who is paying radio stations the most this week?

Stellarium

[ajs]

Stellarium is right up there with Celestia for outstanding astro simulations. I use the two together when planning a night of stargazing or meteor watching in the mountains, and highly recommend them to anyone. Both have somewhat odd UIs to get used to, but it's one of the rare cases where the app itself is so uniquely useful that the UI is a secondary concern.

Re:Stellarium

[ajs]

I was really disapointed to find out that they are planning to migrate to a Qt-based interface instead of their current one or instead of using a more open toolkit such as GTK+. There's nothing "more open" about GTK+. Qt was a commercial toolkit with a semi-proprietary license many years ago, but has long been under the GPL.

This means that I will probably have to stop using it (or maintain a fork) because Qt is banned in my company. Banning the use of apps which utilize a certain toolkit (unless there's some financial or security impact from using that toolkit) is absurd. Find a new company.

SourceForge Too Big And Now Not Supported

[curmudgeon99]

SourceForge is too big now. If you start a project and have a support request--good luck getting it answered. Having fought with their CVS implementation for a few weeks, I abandoned sourceforge for GoogleCode. Much easier.

Re:SourceForge Too Big And Now Not Supported

[Otter]

As an example, search for "calendar". 2 of the first 3 returned have no code, and no website.

Yes, we refer to those as "Outlook killers".

Stellarium, by the way, is a superb piece of software and it's good to see it get attention even via a route as clueless as this article.

Re:SourceForge Too Big And Now Not Supported

[_xeno_]

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.

Re:SourceForge Too Big And Now Not Supported

[anomalous cohort]

Having fought with their CVS implementation for a few weeks

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.

Go Azureus!

[mattgreen]

Let me tell you, I've always wanted a Java P2P client. My biggest irk with uTorrent is it doesn't take up enough resources. Honestly, I can't believe the developers of uTorrent had the nerve to not put an entire plug-in architecture into it. They're totally missing the boat here.

Besides, everyone KNOWS that the more design patterns you use, the better your program is!

Re:Go Azureus!

[twistedsymphony]

Despite your snaky cynicism (which is probably what got your the flamebait mod) I tend to agree with you sentiment. I ditched Azures months ago for uTorrent due mostly to it's unnecessary bloat. Are there even any worth while plug-ins for it?

For the type of app that generally runs consistently in the background bloat is the last thing you want, similarly a pretty interface isn't all that necessary based on the amount of time most users will actually spend looking at it.

Re:Go Azureus!

[Kalewa]

Tell me about it. I switched to uTorrent awhile ago and now all of my RAM is just...sitting around. It's not even doing anything. I mean come on, where's the bloated interface and memory leaks I'd become so accustomed to? Hell, I don't even have to change processor priority on uTorrent when I want to play a game. I want a program I have to maintain.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Don't worry

[deanoaz]

The bad thing is, I'm only 97 percent sure that was written by some kind of randomizing post creating software. There are enough really weird people around that I have to consider the possibility that all of that made sense to somebody.