sourceforge

Behind the scenes on SourceForge's acquisition of Ohloh

SourceForge on Thursday announced its acquisition of Ohloh, operator of Ohloh.net, an open-source data and community service. While the acquisition makes sense--Ars Technica dubs the move "the latest in a string of very smart moves that are rapidly turning SourceForge into the collaboration powerhouse that it originally aspired to become"--I wanted to know more about the "how" of the deal.

When did the deal take shape, and how did it come about?

To get answers, I asked Jon Sobel, group president of media at SourceForge, to provide some details.

Q: How and when … Read more

Nominations now open for SourceForge.net awards

SourceForge, despite competition, remains the leading repository for open-source projects. Many of the world's best open-source projects--JBoss, MySQL, SugarCRM, and others--start there, and plenty never leave.

For these reasons and others, each year I look forward to the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards, which allow the open-source community to vote on the industry's top projects. SourceForge has just announced that nominations are now open for the Sourceforge.net Community Choice Awards 2009.

While such direct democracy has yielded some odd choices in the past, the competition remains one of the best places to discover up-and-coming open-source projects.

This … Read more

SourceForge wants to host your app

Many open-source projects would love to offer a hosted version of their products, but lack the resources to be able to do so. SourceForge, the world's largest repository of open-source projects, is therefore stepping into the void to host open-source applications.

The company actually announced this new program in October 2008, initially with just three applications: LimeSurvey, MediaWiki, and phpBB. Since then, SourceForge has added another half-dozen or so applications, and plans to grow the service further.

In a conversation I had on Thursday with Ross Turk, SourceForge community manager, I suggested that this could be a way for … Read more

SourceForge finds its advertising rhythm

SourceForge recently reported results for its second fiscal quarter of 2009, and seems to have finally found its rhythm. The company, which for years tried to split its time between software (SourceForge Enterprise, purchased by Collabnet in 2007) and media (Slashdot, ITManagersJournal, Linux.com, etc.), and struggled to tell a coherent story.

As its most recent results suggest, however, SourceForge is beginning to find consistency as a media company, as demonstrated in its year-over-year growth in key areas:

Ad Network revenue increased 84 percent; Premium product revenue grew 100% to $1.0 million; Media uniques grew 9 percent to 36 … Read more

The free-download economy is dead

Perhaps you didn't notice, but 2008 marked the last year when SourceForge downloads mattered.

Throughout the year, and for a consistent period of several months, the statistics function on SourceForge stopped working. My own company, which had been tracking our downloads closely, suddenly was flying blindly.

Guess what? Life went on. Not only that, but we moved our central downloads repository to our own Web site because we needed consistency that SourceForge apparently couldn't give us. It also became obvious that download tallies were secondary to something SourceForge never gave us: insight into those downloading our software.

The … Read more

Open source votes for Obama, and other inconsistencies

The next time you're tempted to pull out your copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention or your local LUG (Linux User Group), don't bother. While the open-source world often gets credited with Libertarian leanings, recent poll results from SourceForge, which it provided to me yesterday, don't support this view.

In fact, the poll of US-based Slashdot and SourceForge visitors has 56 percent of this largely open-source crowd voting for big-government Obama, with only 30 percent voting for McCain.

Outside the US, the poll found that 93 percent of international … Read more

SourceForge turns to virtualization for hosted apps

SourceForge is trying to get development and collaboration tools in the hands of their users more quickly these days. They are announcing on Monday a new service for developers that provides fast, virtualized access to popular open-source apps. This is not a perfect solution, but a good quick way to answer some developer needs.

SourceForge isn't trying to reinvent the wheel. If there's an open-source tool out there that already works, it can now provide it easier to developers. That's smart. The first three being announced are LimeSurvey (survey app), MediaWiki, and phpBB (forum app). These were … Read more

The best place to host your open-source project

Just a few short years ago, there was one open-source hosting service worth considering: Sourceforge.net. It was by no means perfect (Alfresco's analytics, for example, have been down for over a month on Sourceforge, with no apparent urgency to fix the problem), but it was good enough, free, and everyone else used it.

Today, there are multiple options, including Google Code, Microsoft CodePlex, CodeHaus, GitHub, and, interestingly, Canonical's Launchpad.

Yes, Launchpad. Launchpad is the brainchild of Mark Shuttleworth's Ubuntu team, but it has aspirations beyond hosting the Ubuntu code, aspirations that recently attracted MySQL to move its code over to the Launchpad service.

I don't recall Launchpad starting with this third-party code hosting premise in mind, but it certainly has gone there fast. OStatic has an excellent write-up on its new features, and whether they're compelling enough to put your open-source project there.

For a new project, it's definitely an interesting choice. But the larger question is whether an established project - especially commercial projects - gets adequate value from any hosting service to justify hosting with a prefabricated hosting service. SugarCRM moved from Sourceforge to hosting its own project, and other companies have done the same. (My own company is in the process of exploring options.)

Why host your own project? Why take on that cost?… Read more

And the winners of the 2008 Sourceforge Community Choice Awards are...

The Sourceforge Community Choice Awards were announced tonight at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, with few surprises.

Well, I suppose the biggest surprise is that people stubbornly vote for the same projects each year, even when they fail to live up to their billing, or have already surpassed their category. I noted before that there were some curious finalists. The winners? Curiouser and curiouser.

Best Project: OpenOffice.org Best Project for the Enterprise: OpenOffice.org Best Project for Education: OpenOffice.org Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition: phpMyAdmin Best Project for Multimedia: VLC Best Project for Gamers: … Read more