Just a few short years ago, there was one open-source hosting service worth considering: Sourceforge.net. It was by no means perfect (Alfresco's analytics, for example, have been down for over a month on Sourceforge, with no apparent urgency to fix the problem), but it was good enough, free, and everyone else used it.
Today, there are multiple options, including Google Code, Microsoft CodePlex, CodeHaus, GitHub, and, interestingly, Canonical's Launchpad.
Yes, Launchpad. Launchpad is the brainchild of Mark Shuttleworth's Ubuntu team, but it has aspirations beyond hosting the Ubuntu code, aspirations that recently attracted MySQL to move its code over to the Launchpad service.
I don't recall Launchpad starting with this third-party code hosting premise in mind, but it certainly has gone there fast. OStatic has an excellent write-up on its new features, and whether they're compelling enough to put your open-source project there.
For a new project, it's definitely an interesting choice. But the larger question is whether an established project - especially commercial projects - gets adequate value from any hosting service to justify hosting with a prefabricated hosting service. SugarCRM moved from Sourceforge to hosting its own project, and other companies have done the same. (My own company is in the process of exploring options.)
Why host your own project? Why take on that cost?
... Read MoreSourceforge 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.
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