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 changing. This past year they've added wikis and other functionality that helps with collaboration around projects. There's also Marketplace, which allows you to buy and sell related products and services.
Continuing in the vein of bringing new technology and functionality to its army of open-source users, today SourceForge is announcing implementation of OpenID. OpenID is an open-source single sign-on technology that allows an individual to jump between online accounts without re-entering a username and password each time. That's handy. Even better, they're doing it the right way: They're starting by accepting OpenID log-ins, not providing them. This follows nicely in the spirit of the open-source community. Many big name companies have declared OpenID support, but often only as Identity Providers. Meaning, they're happy to extend their user log-ins, but won't accept OpenIDs created elsewhere. What's open about that? (Google's Blogger is a major exception.)
From the SourceForge.net Community Blog: "It's bringing us back in touch with fresh Web (2.0) technology; as a decentralized open-source standard, it's a perfect fit for us--it allows us to streamline more user interaction and participation with our site, and hopefully more for the whole OSS community."
For more information, go to: http://alexandria.wiki.sourceforge.net/OpenID
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 hours a security breach might allow, get it into production, and incur serious liability as a result. Last time I checked, enterprise software adoption and implementation doesn't work quite that fast.
Still, it's cause for SourceForge to bolster its defenses, especially how it gets the word out in case of a breach.
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 moreVA 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.
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