SourceForge

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Mon Jan 12 18:50:12 UTC 2004


Duane Maxwell <dmaxwell at san.rr.com> wrote:
> It sounds to me like somebody's been given a mandate to get rid of as 
> many projects as possible in order to reduce the burden on  the 
> SourceForge servers.  If so, I wouldn't be surprised.  I cringe 
> whenever I find out a project is hosted there - "Planning" projects are 
> the most numerous, with "Pre-Alpha" and "Alpha" in third and fourth 
> places.  I don't mean to say that SourceForge isn't useful, but the 
> signal-to-noise ratio is pretty low.

This seems entirely reasonable, really.  I was wondering if the old way
could really be sustained.  I can tell you the review time has also
increased for getting a new project; I seem to remember that you used to
just click a button and the project came into existence.



> I always wondered how VA Software was justifying the expense - this is, 
> after all, a company trading at 2% of its IPO price, with 12% of its 
> float shorted and I find it hard to believe that SF is anything but a 
> cash drain.  This purge might be the first sign of the inevitable 
> collapse of SourceForge.

Maybe.  But really, they are inevitably going to limit themselves to
reasonably open projects, and other systems such as Tigris are going to
have the same decision to face.

While Squeak does not need SourceForge or Debian or anything else to
survive, it certainly does mean that we are onloading efforts that other
open source projects get for free.  The time adds up when people are
mucking with CVS and bug tracking and auto-build and mailing list
management etc. etc. instead of working on the main goals of the
project.  But heck, the project will certainly continue.

The good news is that SourceForge itself is open source.  I wonder how
hard it would be to set up a SourceForge clone ?


-Lex



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