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BerliOS Software Repository Will Close At Year's End
An anonymous reader writes with some sad news from Germany, as posted on the BerliOS front page, and sent by email to developers as well. An excerpt: "As an European, non-proprietary project BerliOS pursued the goal to support the various open-source players and provide a neutral mediator function. In 2011 over 4710 projects have been hosted on BerliOS, with 50,000 registered users and over 2.6 million file downloads each month. We are proud that with BerliOS we have brought the idea of an OSS repository to Europe. Meanwhile, the concept has prevailed and there are many good alternatives. Unfortunately, as a research institute Fraunhofer FOKUS has only few opportunities to operate a repository like BerliOS. Such a project will only work with a follow-up financing, or with sponsors or partners taking over the repository. In the field of OSS this is a difficult undertaking. In a recent survey the community indicated some support in funds and manpower which we would like to thank you for. Unfortunately, the result is not enough to put the project on a sustainable financial basis. In addition the search for sponsors or partners was unsuccessful. ... As a developer, you should export your BerliOS project into another repository." BerliOS is slated to close on December 31st.
BerliOS we Berli knew ye.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I know the SF overlords are listening. I bet a lot of people will want to migrate their projects from berlios to another site...
I started researching tools and writing scripts to split up a repository and move to github yesterday.
If you have a complicated non-standard svn layout, you should look into the svn2git on gitorious (there are many tools with that name).
Hi. As someone else mentioned in some German forum, it is probable that all orphaned projects on BerliOS will perish the day BerliOS is taken down for good. - Anyone here who could offer a full mirror of the data. Or would Archive.org be an option? zapyon
I like my spaghetti with source.
BerliOS definitely has publicity problems. Either that, or the people running it don't have much of a passion for keeping it running, because the first I heard about them having problems was about them deciding to shut it down.
Contrast that to, say, Wikipedia, Blender, or The Document Foundation. Major publicity when they needed money, with progress tallies and everything. Especially Wikipedia.
Have a nice time.
Yeah, their fundraiser got so much publicity it became memetic.
Damn, not only a grammar nazi, but someone that considers England to be in Europe! I thought that was a shooting offence here in the UK (or has the EU H&S statute outlawed that now?).
I introduce myself as British or, perhaps, English. To then lump me in as a European (ha, yes, you're correct, my natural instinct is to use "a", not "an") is likely to get you a very stern look, even if *technically* correct.
It's like calling a Mexican or Canadian "American". Technically correct (continent-wise), but they *will* slap you.
Who's heart's bleeding? The Faunhofer Institute, isn't that the bunch of goons that burn government money and then want money for the stuff they come up with? A sense of warmth is not what comes up immediately whenever the name is mentioned.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I thought Fraunhofer was mostly sponsored by the MP3 playing crowds?
Problem is, according to that homepage, it is expected to last even less than BerliOS: 40 days.
I have a Mexican friend. She will slap anyone who calls her American unless they go to the extreme length of qualifying it as being only the continent first. Even then, she gets pissed off. She's happy for you to call US people American, but because of vast misunderstanding in the common populace she doesn't want to be associated with the word "America" at all. If you ask her, she'll tell you she's Mexican, never American (or even North American). Even if you ask what continent she's on, she'll be likely to explain at copious length that it's only a technicality that she's in a place called North America.
Because that's almost EXACTLY what happens with UK/Europe ("Oh, you're English? I so *love* Europe") we can sympathise. To us, if you went to Europe and the UK, you went to two separate places. Hell, *we* go to Europe. We actually say that we're going to "the continent" when we go there. Technically, yes, our continental grouping is called Europe. Culturally, colloquially and even in terms of news, politics and general conversation, Europe is an entirely different place to us.
I imagine a lot of Canadians feel the same way and I have heard people say things like "You're Canadian? Cool. When I was over in New York..."
Sounds to me like you're describing some serious cultural anxiety there.
And you're deluding yourself about the difference between the UK and continental Europe. The UK isn't so different and the various countries in continental Western Europe aren't as similar as you seem to think. Having been in all of those places, the difference between Germany and the UK is smaller than, e.g., the difference between Germany and Italy or Spain. In either case, the similarities dominate. And the dissimilarities within the countries (e.g. between urban and rural, richest vs poorest 10%) are more significant than the dissimilarities between the countries.
It's obviously not even the same ball park as the difference between Mexico and the US; I mean, that's just ludicrous.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Oh wow, a little Englander on slashdot, I thought you'd all be at the Tory conference in Manchester.
I describe myself first as British, secondly as a (proud) European, and lastly and hardly ever as English, for all the negative connotations people like you have given it.
Britain is a European country, it has a proud history of involvement (for the better too) with the other countries in Europe, and it is a European culture.
Britain is a European country, it has a proud history of involvement (for the better too) with the other countries in Europe and it is a European culture.
Just don't mention the war.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_software_hosting_facilities
and think, how can ANYONE get a handle on archiving this?
archive.org certainly isn't going to do this.
This is something the Open Source community is going to have to deal with. Just how, exactly do
you preserve something is big that is constantly changing? Archive off the static projects?
All the hosted projects should be archived. I was looking for an older uvcvideo driver source the other day and all the links Google pointed me to were dead BerliOS links. It was a very maddening experience.
I offer to host an archived version of BerliOS over a dedicated 35Mbps (symmetric) connection and have systems and TBs of hard drive space to spare. Please get in touch with me if you think this will help. Whatever you do, don't kill the whole thing. Not all projects will get exported before the closure. That would be a terrible waste.
code not suitable for export to countries such as Iran according to US foreign policy rules
I don't think Britain falls under the description, "such as Iran". Any export is controlled by US foreign policy rules, silly.
I think "countries such as Iran" alluded to license exception TSU. This exception applies to exports of publicly available cryptographic source code (or binaries built from such source code) and has two caveats. First, it applies only to countries other than Country Group E:1 (Cuba, Iran, DPRK, etc.), which could be construed as requiring IP address geolocation. Second, the publisher has to advertise each project to the U.S. government. Some people may have objected to this notification requirement.
Write them, here: http://www.fokus.fraunhofer.de/de/fokus/kontakt/institutsleitung/index.html