SourceForge

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Sourceforge.net logo

SourceForge is a collaborative software development management system. SourceForge is proprietary software and is sold by VA Software. It provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of open source applications (such as PostgreSQL and Subversion).

SourceForge.net is a centralized location for software developers to control and manage open source software development, and acts as a source code repository. SourceForge.net is hosted by VA Software and runs a version of the SourceForge software. A large number of open source projects are hosted on the site (it had reached 125,090 projects and 1,352,225 registered users as of July 2006), although it does contain many dormant or single-user projects.

1 SourceForge software licensing and competitors
2 Benefits To Open Source Projects
3 Banned in mainland China
4 See also
5 External link

[edit] SourceForge software licensing and competitors

The SourceForge software, which was originally itself open source software was commercialized by a closed-source license. The latest available version of SourceForge, version 2.5 from the CVS repository, was forked by the GNU project as Savane. It was also later forked as GForge by one of the SourceForge programmers.

SourceForge also competes with other providers such as Bounty Source, Tigris.org (powered by CollabNet), berlios.de, and GNU Savannah.

[edit] Benefits To Open Source Projects

SourceForge.net or SF.net for short is synonymous with Open Source projects. It allows any project uniquely named in its registry to be sub-domained as http://project-name.sourceforge.net/ or http://project-name.sf.net/ . This gives some prominent url branding to a project and a high activity in it can get the project listed on the main page http://sourceforge.net/ as a Top Project. Having a high number of registered members numbering over a million, and often been researched for project information, any participating project can gain fast access to the market of developers and users for a short and efficient adoption rate.

SF.net provide ample diskspace for a project to completely house their contents such as wiki, mysql database, source codes versions, and even their own website pages at the subdomain location.

The important main tabs for a project page in SourceForge.net are Admin, Forums, Tasks, Mailing Lists and Download Files. Developers can even manage and schedule tasks, with automatic emailing to assignees, and even Forums can be monitored via email, rather than browse constantly.

Bugs and Feature Requests allow owners to keep track of their development work. Administrators can also limit certain forums to members only, or act in unregulated manner that may even completely go against the noble intent of SF.net to keep everything open.

For project owners to get the most out of the SF.net and gain market share, they have to be themselves highly active in the forums, very conversant with newbies, and basically doing all their activities there to make their ratings rise as well as prove their visibility for surfers to stay on.

[edit] Banned in mainland China

The entire sourceforge.net website was banned in mainland China around 2002. The ban of the projects' host was released in 2003, but the vhost.sourceforge.net was still banned until late 2004 or early 2005. ^{[citation needed]}

It is reported that Sourceforge was banned again in February 2006, but not in the entire country. ^{[citation needed]} Few were actually affected by this supposed ban, so instead, this could be a temporary regional router glitch.