Sourceforge

Microsoft extends adoption to the home

Microsoft has a clever Home Use Program that "provides a simple way for staff to work at home with the same Microsoft products they use at work." It's also a great way for Microsoft to spread its software and prevent would-be Mac or open-source users from straying from the Microsoft fold.

Speaking of which, Apple has a similar program, of which my company takes part. I can get Apple hardware and software at a discount, even when not buying it for work. To Apple (and Microsoft), it's a way to expand adoption at a lower cost … Read more

Random Sampler: Microsoft vs. Google, SugarCRM, Flock gets funded (?!?), Ubuntu, and more

There are a number of interesting tidbits floating around the web this morning. Among the best:

The VAR Guy compares Google's impressive growth against Microsoft's and comes to this conclusion: "[S]orry, Microsoft bashers: The software giant isn't collapsing." Potty. Flock raised another $15 million in a Series D round. Why is anyone still funding this paltry Firefox feature? Flock claims that it gets paid for search placement, but given its niche following, who cares? The Guardian spoke with Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth about a wide range of things, from how he hires to the changing desktop market. On this latter point, Mark said, "[P]eople are increasingly defining the desktop as the thing that they get access to the internet from. In that case, there's a real possibility that we're able to shift people onto different platforms." Like Ubuntu, of course.… Read more

SourceForge embraces OpenID

A great many open-source projects and companies have started on SourceForge.net. There's currently about 176,000 registered projects and 1.8 million registered users. Sure, not all of them are active or essential software, but if you want to build an open-source project, it can be a great place to get up and going. You may not go to SourceForge directly very often, but if you download open-source software, it's often sitting on SourceForge servers.

If there's been one knock against them, it's that their infrastructure is just average, not the latest-greatest. That may be … Read more

Slashdot parent company experiences overnight outage

UPDATE (6:04 a.m. PT): SourceForge's sites are back up. UPDATE (1:27 p.m. PT): Comment from SourceForge was added.

On Wednesday morning, there appeared to be some sort of outage at SourceForge Inc., parent company of iconic geek news forum Slashdot and retailer ThinkGeek (among others). Neither SourceForge nor the sites it operates were accessible at 5:30 a.m. PT. According to SourceForge, it was an emergency maintenance window that "caused an unanticipated network outage."

As they might have said at Slashdot rival Fark, "Everybody panic!"

Performance monitoring firm Pingdom reported that Slashdot was down … Read more

Sourceforge.net opens up its Community Choice Awards

Nominations won't open until April, but Sourceforge.net has already made the news by opening up its 2008 Community Choice Awards to any open-source project, no matter where it is hosted. In the past open-source projects had to be registered on Sourceforge.net to be considered. Not this year.

I really like the categories, too, some of which are new to the competition:

Best Project Best Project for the Enterprise Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition [New] - Am I allowed to vote for my own company/project? :-) Best Project for Multimedia… Read more

Underexposed blog: Links of the day

Rob Bearden of JBoss, Red Hat, and OpenSpan joins Benchmark Capital - Bearden was OpenSpan COO; before that, COO at open-source app server company JBoss, where "he helped architect and execute the company's business model, managed its worldwide operations, and played a key role in its acquisition by Red Hat Software." Take advantage of multiple CPU cores during file compression - Linux.com - "The mgzip tools that can take advantage of multiple CPU cores during file compression, while pbzip2 uses multiple cores for both compression and decompression." Interesting--I don't know how embarrassingly parallel … Read more

Google: The new Sourceforge?

Sourceforge boasts 169,282 registered projects. The actual number of active projects may be as low as 15,000. This is still an impressive number, but it may not be enough to stave off the Google threat.

Just two years after Google kicked off project hosting on its Google Code site, Google is reporting that it now hosts over 80,000 projects. Given how new it is (and how infrequently Sourceforge prunes its projects, if at all), it may well be that Google now has more active projects hosted on its Google Code site than Sourceforge.

The real question, of … Read more

Open source and the Long Tail: An interview with Chris Anderson

Recently I was fortunate to interview Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and the keynote speaker for the Open Source Think Tank, coming up February 7-9 in Napa Valley, Calif. Given Chris' views, I think he's an ideal person to headline an event whose theme is "The Future of Commercial Open Source." (While attendance is by invitation only, you can still apply for admittance.)

Everyone has heard about Chris Anderson's article, book, and blog, The Long Tail. If you haven't, you don't live on this planet (not that there's anything wrong with that). Anderson's theory--that there is big opportunity in lots of little markets--resonates in a world whose technology increasingly permits, encourages, and even requires that we move beyond mass market product development to cater to individual tastes.

As Chris put it in his original Wired article:

For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching--a market response to inefficient distribution.

Free products (or, at least, their discovery) from the physical world, however, and the economics of consumption change. Dramatically.

I spent some time talking with Chris to see how his theory applies to open source. His ideas pushed me to re-examine my own, as my thoughts on how the Long Tail would apply to open source turned out to be a bit naive...… Read more

SourceForge hacked, but not to worry(?)

Valleywag reports that SourceForge.net was hacked Wednesday, resulting in site downtime while SourceForge tracked down the hacker. SourceForge's Ross Turk confirms the report:

We played a game of cat and mouse with a "security enthusiast" from Europe yesterday. :) No harm done, though, and everything's running smoothly.

Given that projects upload their code to the SourceForge repository on a regular basis, there's not any serious cause for concern that a security breach would be a long-term threat. Additionally, it's doubtful that anyone would download and install any critically important software in the minutes or … Read more