The Irony of Sourceforge
Sourceforge is an invaluable tool for developers that don't have a budget for proprietary software. You can find a lot of useful bits and pieces there, not to mention wholes and entires, that are incredibly useful for whatever your software needs are. As a staunch supporter of OSS, I'd say I was a fan.
Well, until today. Today we find the wrench in the works.
I was interested in the software behind Sourceforge itself - the code that makes this a great repository for thousands upon thousands of projects - because I'd like to set up something somewhat similar for a few projects of interest to me. I was shocked and amazed to find out that Sourceforge itself is no longer Open Source! The salient points from the article:
- SourceForge was Open until 2001 (and the 2.7 branch remains Open)
- It was made proprietary because of change to the developer's "core business from systems and services to software, and repeated instances of use and extension of the Open Source codebase by companies who declined to share their improvements."
Bemused by the mildly delicious yet decidedly offputting irony of this situation, I did a bit of research and have come across a few more solutions, including one that is very promising: GForge. Gforge seems to be the continuation of SourceForge under the GPL and as such, it has much going for it right off the bat; it's similar to SourceForge, it's not chalk-full of irony, and it has a fair community devoted to it. If you need a (blank)Forge of your own, I would certainly recommend trying this one out... and then reporting back to me on your overall impression.