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 course, is how important or relevant these projects are. I've not heard of many (any?) high-profile open-source projects moving to Google Code, though there certainly are some making the move. Regardless, it may well be difficult to compete with Google's hosting and search expertise over the long haul.
Will the world notice a diminished Sourceforge? I think so, but maybe I'm just nostalgic.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Take it with a large pinch of salt (I've not followed up the detail) ... even so ...
Reading your post made me do a little bit of research about how many of our registered projects are genuine and usable. I found something that was actually quite encouraging: the 50,000th most active project on SourceForge.net had seven downloads last week. Granted, having downloads is just one indicator of a project's vitality, but I think it still shows how long the tail actually is.
Also, I thought I'd say a few things about our pruning strategy. We actually do prune projects - if a project contains no actual code and their admin fails to respond to our purge notification, we'll remove it. It's not something we do all the time, but we do it periodically. However, we're pretty conservative for a reason: it's important to us that SourceForge.net is a place where things can be stored safely. In fact, I wrote about that goal in a blog post over on the SourceForge.net Community Hub as part of a series on what I think SourceForge.net's role in open source is. http://tinyurl.com/ywdkk5
Regarding the larger point of your article, I think there's one thing we've got in common with Google: we both believe in the higher goals of open source, and are working towards the same end. I think that's what's important.
Cya,
Ross (SF.net community guy)