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Programming IT Technology

What Would We Do Without SourceForge? 11

Posted by Cliff from the routing-around-potential-damage dept.
vrmlguy asks: "While looking for something else, I found this discussion of SourceForge. As the authors point out, a great many Open Source projects have moved to SourceForge. I would like to compare this to another dependency that turned out badly. Deja.com provided a service that many, many people had depended on for years. (See this posting for a more jaundiced view of this dependency). Suddenly and without warning, they went out of business. This left quite a few people high and dry. My question is, what would happen if (heaven forbid!) something similar happened to SourceForge? I realize that 'everybody' affilated with a given project has their own copy of the piece that they are working on, but does any one person have a copy of everything any more? How hard would it be to put Humpdy Dumpdy back together? Are there any mirrors? Are they safe? Inquiring minds want to know!" If SourceForge were to close its open ports for the final time, tomorrow, I'm sure the community would find a way to continue. With that said, however, what are ways we can mitigate the damage if it happens?
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What Would We Do Without SourceForge? More

What Would We Do Without SourceForge?

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  • Perhaps it's time to include a feature in SourceForge to allow a project to point at a second seperate CVS for automatic copies of everything related to the project. Then if a project could secure the backup space somewhere, that should alleviate any concerns.

  • If SourceForge suddenly dissappeared there would certainly be an adjustment time, and a lot of projects would never get the same kind of infrastructure again. But thos projects would likely be small enough that they don't really need it. It's convenient, but not essential.

    I certainly have a recently updated CVS of everything I'm working on, I suspect most other people do as well. Besides that, it's unlikely that VA would go out of business and take all their data with them. There's absolutely no reason for them not to make the data available elsewhere, even if just to allow the various projects to pick up the pieces.

    I'm also aware of at least one other SourceForge-like project that's affiliated with the FSF. I don't have a lot of info on it and I don't know how far along it is, but it's clear that other people would step in to offer services similar to what VA has. Maybe not on the same scale, but at least adequate.

  • I believe that http://savannah.gnu.org/ is what you're thinking of.
    It appears to be available for any registered GNU project...
    (And it uses the sourceforge codebase)
  • Most projects have someone who is the leader and keeps the originals of everything. If I were running a project, everything but everything would go into CVS including the tar distribution including all doco, even the web pages.
  • ...However aren't all the script and pages of SourceForge part of a tarball on their site? Couldn't someone just download this and recreate another identical (or almost) site?

    Yes, of course, but the real fear is that SourceForge *suddenly* shuts down. What would you do if you had a project on it, and when you tried to access it tomorrow all that appeared was a message stating that they're having "difficulties", and would be back on line as soon as they've been bought or something. If you have no way of accessing your current data (and are foolish enough not to back it up regularly!), you'd be screwed.
  • As long as there was enough warning by the people at SourceForge, I don't think the loss of their service would be too tragic (well, we *would* miss them, and mourn their demise here on slashdot!).

    Most projects would take a bit of time to deal with the transition, but the way I see it, within a week each project would be worked on in a "pre-SF" way. Larger projects have enough people working on them that *someone* is bound to have a box with enough horsepower and bandwidth available to set up a decent cvs server (and possibly mirror their own private SF-type site, as others have suggested). Smaller projects would be fine regardless; they usually are just a bunch of friends or aquaintances workign on something that could just as easily be done on email. And those projects that just aren't being worked on, they'd die with SF. (This is a good thing; one of my pet peeves is thinking I found a program I really needed but didn't have the time to work on myself, only to find out it hasn't been updated in 18 months).
  • Whilst I'm sure that every reasonable project could reconstruct it's CVS (or at least the released copies and current versions) of their software, there could very well be a serious problem with things like the bug trackers and mailing lists.

    I certainly don't have a list of the people on the various mailing lists associated with my projects - so the immediate effect would be that
    team members would find it hard to tell everyone where the new web site/server is and how to get
    back together again to continue working.

    I guess we could always make an announcement on Slashdot...oh...wait...
  • one of my pet peeves is thinking I found a program I really needed but didn't have the time to work on myself, only to find out it hasn't been updated in 18 months

    Have a look at the vitality index on Freshmeat. An example is available at the bottom of their stats page [freshmeat.net].

    Have fun //Johan

  • ...believe it or not.
    They sell servers with a SourceForge environment preinstalled. This is very useful for corporations in managing internal projects.

    That meant that the people working on SourceForge were not affected by the recent VA Linux layoffs.
    According to this Salon article [salon.com] at least.

    There are also other webbased collaboration sites, such as collab.net, mentioned in the article.
  • Please forgive my poor knowledge of sourceforce. I have yet to work on anything there. However aren't all the script and pages of SourceForge part of a tarball on their site ? Couldn't someone just download this and recreate another identical (or almost) site ?
  • You'd expect SourceForge's holders to at least have the decency to send mail to the project admins so they can grab their stuff and leave.

    Of course these days dot-coms only care about staying afloat, good practices are low on the priority list.

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