[ SourceForge.net’s manager, Patrick McGovern, has
rebutted several of the points made in this article. ]
“Over the past few months the SourceForge development
facility, which hosts a large number of Free Software projects, has
changed its policies. Features for exporting a project from
SourceForge have been removed. The implementation used to be
exclusively Free Software but is now based on non-free software.
Finally, VA Linux[1] has become rather underhand in their attempts
to grasp exclusive control of contributors’ work.SourceForge did a lot of good for the Free Software community,
but it’s now time to break free.SourceForge brought to Free Software a unified and standard
development methodology based on modern tools. Before SourceForge,
such tools (bug tracking, cvs, web, support, forums, polls, news,
etc.) were available individually, but few developers used many of
them together, because they had to set up the combined facilities
on their own. SourceForge made the combination conveniently
available for both new and experienced developers.Because of the convenience of SourceForge, many Free Software
developers have come to take this collection of features for
granted, and would be reluctant to go back to the old way of doing
things. Unfortunately, this means that when SourceForge itself
takes a turn for the worse, it tends to pull Free Software
developers down with it.”