By Emmett Plant
Editor, LinuxToday
While I was wandering the expo floor at The Bazaar in New York
City, I stopped by the VA Linux booth to see what was going on. I
assumed I would find several people carrying large money bags
around, but I found something a lot cooler — SourceForge!
SourceForge is a web
resource for Open Source projects and organizations. With a truly
astounding amount of hardware and bandwidth at their disposal,
SourceForge seems extremely well placed to become the most
important community resource we’ve seen yet. SourceForge is paid
for and staffed by VA Linux, the selfsame Open Source company that
made a ton of cash on their IPO just a week ago.
If you’ve got an Open Source project, look at SourceForge before
you start running your own services. SourceForge is a complete
success on the organizational level and the services it provides
are unbeatable. CVS, mailing lists, public forums, the ability to
poll visitors and project members, bug tracking and anonymous FTP,
as well as the feeling of being part of a larger community merely
by being part of SourceForge. Don’t forget another extremely cool
thing; full backups, and the ability to check the logs from the
archiver program!
All systems counted, the combined processor speed of SourceForge
is 11.4Gz, 9.5 gigs of ram, and 1.34 terabytes of storage (after
RAID). The breakdown of this incredible horsepower is available at
SourceForge’s hardware page.
A lot of great community projects have already moved or mirrored
services to SourceForge. Projects like Crystal Space, Licq, and The
Berlin Project have signed on, and even the SourceForge development
tools are available! The main page lists the current ‘favorites’
based on a score from one to five that anyone can vote on.
Not only is SourceForge a great resource for Open Source
projects, it’s a great resource for anyone interested in seeing how
Open projects come to fruition in their own environment. I’m
sure that before long, someone will write their master’s thesis on
SourceForge as the grapevine by which Open Source projects ripen.
It used to be difficult to find ‘sponsorship’ for Open Source
projects. Often, there were two or three guys working on a project
over IRC on 56k dialups, trying to build a good web site for the
project out of five megs of webspace from their ISP. Now the sky’s
the limit, and we can only benefit from it.
At The Bazaar, SourceForge was one of the ‘talks of the show.’
All of a sudden, finding and joining an Open Source project became
a lot easier, and the initiates that attended the show were
certainly interested after hearing keynotes preach about Open
Source and the future of technology. Conversations that used to end
with ‘we can host it on my site for now, and then move it later,’
ended with ‘…so we’ll get our SourceForge acount set up this
week, and we’ll be ready to go.’ It’s good to see that VA Linux’s
community sponsorship hasn’t faded given their recent success. Keep
up the good work, guys!