[CLUE-Talk] FYI: SourceForge

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Sean LeBlanc wrote:

> Just wondering what you guys thought about this:
>
> http://www.rons.net.cn/english/FSM/loic

I think that conspiracy theories about SourceForge moving
to "lock-in" projects are a bit much -- but there are some
valid concerns about the whole SourceForge thing. I don't
think VA is trying to "lock-in" or do anything nefarious,
but I'm not sure the overall effect of SourceForge has
been a good thing.

I've noticed a lot of projects on SourceForge are very sloppy
in terms of putting together information about the projects
themselves -- no homepage, no screenshots, little documentation.
I think that's because there's a skeleton framework there already
and some people seem to think that's enough. If you look at
"successful" projects, though, they have very comprehensive info
for developers and users alike.

My main concern is the health of VA and the number of vital
projects hosted on SourceForge. I don't think VA is going to
be with us much longer -- not in its current form, anyway, and
eventually some bean-counter is going to decide it's better
to pull the plug on SourceForge -- which is going to create
a lot of confusion about where projects have migrated to.
Many projects only have a "projectname.sourceforge.net" URL.

Also, there is a lot of deadwood on SourceForge. That's not
a criticism of VA or anything, but I think that people are too
quick to knock up a project site if the mood strikes them to
start a project and very few finish them or progress very far.
There doesn't seem to be much encouragement for people doing
the same thing to work together, either.

A lot of complaints and such made in this document were
refuted by VA a long time ago -- when this was posted on Slashdot
or LinuxToday. They're not appropriating code from projects on
Sourceforge, just code towards the SourceForge code itself.
That's not a big concern for me since I've never contributed
code to it. Whether it's right or not for VA to take SourceForge
proprietary or not is up for debate -- but I don't think that
many people are actually using it.

Take care,

Zonker
--
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier -=- jbrockmeier at earthlink.net
http://www.DissociatedPress.net/
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