OStatic

It's often difficult to notice when you're in the midst of making history. In the summer and fall of 1999 I spent some time working next door to four noisy, Mountain Dew-swilling misfits working on a renegade project within VA Linux Systems. Little did I know that their efforts would eventually become the world's
largest open source development site.

I refer, of course, to SourceForge.net, which launched on November 17,
1999. The history and beginnings of SourceForge.net can teach executives and managers today the value of trying crazy things that might (and probably will) fail; of letting your young guns run wild with imagination; and not squashing innovation within your company. This post is about SourceForge.net, the site that was before its time and how it came to be.

One of the highlights of the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) is finding out who won bragging rights in the annual SourceForge Community Choice Awards. More than 47,000 open source projects were nominated for slots in one of 12 categories, but only 85 were chosen as finalists.

The awards party was held last night at the Agenda Lounge in San Jose, CA. where guests gathered to listen to music, snag swag from ThinkGeek, play retro games, and even line up for free tattoos. While past SourceForge parties were recorded with a handheld camera and later uploaded to an online video hosting service, this year the audio/visual setup had a distinctly professional quality. The entire event was shown live on a dedicated Web site for real-time viewing.

SourceForge combed through more than 47,000 nominations to announce which of the open source projects it hosts are finalists in the Fourth Annual Community Choice Awards. Eighty-five projects in 12 categories are in the running and the winners will be announced on July 23, 2009 at OSCON.

Categories run the gamut from technical (Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins) and entertaining (Best Project for Gamers) to life-changing (Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything). Nominated projects are equally wide-ranging and, while there are a number of familiar names like KeePass Password Safe and Audacity, quite a few lesser known projects are being given the opportunity to shine. Avogadro, a cross platform, 3-dimensional molecular editor, is up for Best Project for Academia and microblogging client Choqok has been nominated for Best New Project.

There's one little domain name out there that's had a wild ride this year. In January, a rather cryptic post went up on Linux.com, a SourceForge web property, that said updates had been slowing -- and were as of that point ceasing -- because changes were in the works. Then came the silence on the wire.

In early March came the announcement that the Linux Foundation was taking the reins at Linux.com, transforming it from something rather static into something that could better capture the spirit of learning, experiencing, and giving back that is an enormous part of the operating system's allure. Input from existing Linux.com members and others interested in having a say was gathered through the IDEAFORGE submission tool, and the Foundation got to work at making these wishes a reality.

At this very moment, the little domain name is embarking on the next leg of its journey. The Linux Foundation is officially unveiling the new Linux.com, a product by the community, for the community.

The sites and services existing under the SourceForge umbrella have experienced some significant changes in the past several months. In the first three months of 2009, we've seen management changes and the re-direction of some SourceForge properties. SourceForge is ushering in another change -- free hosting for the Git, Bazaar, and Mercurial source code management systems. These services are now available to every open source project registered with SourceForge.net.

The new source code management (SCM) systems supplement SourceForge's Subversion and CVS support.

The Linux Foundation and Sourceforge have joined forces to rebuild a community on the prime web real estate known as Linux.com.

In its former life, Linux.com featured a mix of unique content and aggregated stories from the wider Linux community. While it hosted forums and allowed reader comments, it wasn't fully collaborative. Late last year, Linux.com ceased updating the aggregated stories, and at the start of 2009, announced that the original content was also coming to an end, but that other (bigger) plans were afoot. The old Linux.com forum software then replaced the articles on the main page, and many were left puzzled about where on earth this rather memorable domain was headed.

The Linux Foundation and Sourceforge have put the transformation in motion -- but where the domain is headed is very much up to the Linux community. Linux developers and users alike are invited to give their thoughts on the IdeaForge on Linux.com.

If you thought the RIAA had cornered the market on heavy-handed, misguided lawsuits, think again. TorrentFreak reports that the Societe civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SPPF) plan on pursuing a lawsuit against three US-based companies that develop P2P applications. Vuze, LimeWire, and Shareaza are the applications targeted in the lawsuit. There is a fourth company named that's not a developer, or a P2P site -- it's a repository.

It's actually not just any repository. It is, for many, the repository for open source applications -- Sourceforge.