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SourceForge.net puts its commercial hat on

From where did you download your last open-source project? In nearly all cases, the answer is, "SourceForge.net." With more than 25 million visitors to SourceForge each month, it's not surprising. What is surprising is that SourceForge has never really done much to monetize its huge traffic and central role in the open-source ecosystem.

Until now. SourceForge just released its SourceForge Marketplace, and it promises to shake up the way open source is bought and sold.

The SourceForge Marketplace complements commercial and community efforts to directly monetize open-source projects. For example, Openbravo could sell its software/support subscriptions on the Marketplace, opening up a new channel. SourceForge will continue to be the center of the open-source download universe, but imagine if some percentage of those could be directly monetized on the SourceForge site. I think that's pretty compelling.

What interests me most, however, is what this means for all those projects that currently don't have easy ways to build a business around a budding project.… Read more

Microsoft Word files to speak to the blind

Microsoft and open-source site SourceForge plan to offer a free plug-in early next year that will convert Office 2007 files to the Daisy format, which translates text to speech.

The free tool will add a "Save as Daisy" option within Word 2007 and 2003. Daisy, or Digital Accessible Information System, XML files can be "read" aloud by speech synthesizers, paired with audio narration, and used to create electronic Braille. Users can navigate open-standard Daisy documents quickly by jumping between page elements such as headers and indexes.

The Daisy Consortium of 70 nonprofits has aimed since 1996 … Read more

Still SourceForge after all these years

James Maguire has written a great article tracing the history of SourceForge, one that is well worth reading, if for no other reason than to get some historical context for one of open source's enduring treasures. SourceForge has become creaky in its eight years, and hasn't kept up with the times in many ways (causing several would-be anchor tenants to host their projects elsewhere).

But it's still a fantastic tool for any new open-source project, and hence the place where most open-source projects are born.

Back in 1999, the folks at VA Linux were just crazy enough to think launching a site for open-source projects was a good idea:

When [VA Linux] went public in December (symbol: LNUX), its stock rocketed from $30 to almost $240 in one day ? a delirious 700 percent return. [Matt's note: I tried desperately to get shares for this. I failed. :-) ]Amid these dizzying champagne fortunes, the company had an idea. A wildly optimistic idea.… Read more

Darwin at play on Sourceforge

Robert Galoppini and colleagues set out to get a good estimate of how many active, stable open-source projects there are. While Sourceforge shows well over 100,000 projects, and other source-code repositories add tens of thousands more, the number of projects that are actively being developed globally is actually a relatively small number:… Read more

Improving Microsoft's CodePlex by contributing Microsoft's own dog food

Wow. Double wow. I haven't seen Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols this worked up since, well, ever. He could almost be writing for The Register with the way he smacks around Microsoft for its top-25 (most active, mind you) open-source projects on CodePlex. It makes for very fun reading.

It doesn't, however, accurately portray the projects--there are some that actually sound useful and interesting--but I don't want a little (just a little, mind you) accuracy get in the way of a good ol' cage match between Microsoft and SJVN.

My favorite (and probably most apt) comment:… Read more

GPLv3: The pace (and plot) thickens

One week after Palamida reported a rather sluggish start to GPLv3 adoption, we're up 41% and growing quickly. This could represent 10% of all active open source projets.

Palamida reports:

As of 1pm PDT, July 13, our research indicates that 164 projects have officially adopted GPLv3, as compared to 116 projects on July 6. An additional 4 projects have adopted LGPLv3 bringing the total LGPLv3 projects to 7.

New project conversions this week include:

GNU projects EMMS (Emacs Multimedia System, a clean and small application to play multimedia files from Emacs), PG (Privacy Guard, a replacement for openPGP) Non-GNU projects such as pluck (a clean, simple content management system), Kl?tzle (an animation program of Linux), and IcyOwl (a C++ IDE)

In addition, 79 new projects have licenses that now read ?GPL v2 or LGPL v2.1 or later,? bringing the total to 2,865. For a complete list of projects, see http://gpl3.palamida.com.… Read more

VA Software's new name: SourceForge

VA Software, having sold its collaborative programming software to erstwhile competitor CollabNet, said last week that it's renamed itself SourceForge after its site used to host open-source software projects. The company also operates the Slashdot "News for Nerds" site, the NewsForge news site and the ThinkGeek retail site for techie novelty products.

At the same time, the Fremont, Calif.-based company reported net income from continuing operations of $1.8 million, or 3 cents per share, for the quarter ended April 30.