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
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 moreValleywag 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 moreMicrosoft 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 to make all published information available to people with visual impairments and learning disabilities.
Digital narration serves computer users with visual impairments, people with learning challenges like dyslexia, as well as those with Parkinson's disease and other conditions that make it hard to type or hold a book.
With the release of the Office 2007 suite in January, Microsoft shunned the popular, XML-based OpenDocument Format for its own, new Office Open XML format. The OOXML documents, which include Word files with the DOCX extension, are easier to retrieve, if corrupted, than older DOC files.
Versions of Word prior to 2007 can open OOXML documents after a one-time download of a free converter from Microsoft. However, critics gripe that Microsoft's format change was unnecessary and clumsy. Microsoft maintains that the new format enables greater flexibility, such as accessibility features.
(See also accessibility in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard.)
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 moreSourceForge has been running a community-driven awards process over the last month, trying to discover the top open-source projects. On Friday, the winners were announced. The ones selected say a lot about those who frequent SourceForge. But before I get into that, here are the winners:
... 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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