SourceForge alternatives?
Posted 13 Dec 2001 at 20:00 UTC by matt
I'm looking for hosting for some free software projects. In a past
article comment,
hacker alluded to "dozens of alternatives", but I've been
only able to find savannah and
hacker's SourceFubar site.
I feel the hosting decision is best made now rather than after
momentum is gained, so I'm curious what else is out there...
I personally can say lots of good things about SEUL. www.seul.org
This is a much smaller scale server located inside the MIT network.
Unlike sites like sourceforge, seul is completely non-automated. So
everything is setup by actual users and by yourself once you get your
account and SSH in.
I don't know how actively SEUL is pursuing more projects to host. If
it sounds like it might be a match for your project, you'll want to start
by looking over the hosting
info.
Currently they host a few semi-popular opensource projects, like pygame (mine, woohoo), worldforge,
tinylinux, pingus, xarchon, xpenguins, gftp,
freehaven, etc.
Well, if you're looking for something automated etc like sourceforge, there
are also Tigris and BerliOS. If you don't need the
automated thingy or even prefer a more personal contact with you hosts, there
are e.g. the SunSITEs, for example Sunsite
Denmark (disclaimer: I'm a little admin there :)
We host many projects at ibiblio.org.
Our is much less structured than SourceForge, but we offer many of the
same services and all with open source software.
Hey, I offer commercial cvs hosting. $10/month for a cvs pserver, or
$5/month with a web hosting account. (no, it's not free, but you get a
lot of personal attention for the price)
http://www.cornerhost.com/cvs/
What do people running hosting sites need to know in order to be able to
configure a hosting facility for a project? That's what we're trying to
work out at coopx.eu.org so that it
can be included in an XML description of a project's hosting. It would
be nice to see more people who run hosting sites active in the lists, or
even just watching so they can implement things once standardised.
What do people running hosting sites need to know in order to be able to
configure a hosting facility for a project? That's what we're trying to
work out at coopx.eu.org so that it
can be included in an XML description of a project's hosting. It would
be nice to see more people who run hosting sites active in the lists, or
even just watching so they can implement things once standardised.
I have a very long email to send to those representing CoopX about my
personal requirements of project hosting and management. I have read all
of the messages in the CoopX mailing list archives, and have briefed
myself on the current issues as discussed there, as well as the vision.
I haven't yet seen many of the important points of
managing a
project hosting facility covered, so this email should cover at least my
own requirements, which extend those of what something like Sourceforge
and others provide. I am very much into mobliity, flexibility, and
manageability. Much of the facilities behind
services like Sourceforge tend to forget that by design. It's almost
engineered out. I hope that CoopX can continue in the vein of Open
Source and project development and management by considering the
faculties and functions that Sourceforge lacks (currently).
Managing several Open Source projects of my own, as well as being the
"meister" in some cases on other Open Source projects keeping things
moving in the right directions, there's a lot more to it than just
PROJ_NAME, PROJ_MAINTAINER, CVSROOT, RELEASE_DATE, and so on.
Distributed and collaborative development involves many, MANY facets and
skills that are not easily discernable from the upper crust of a web
interface, but are very important to those managing the project, the
source code, the workload, the delegation of tasks, the bugs, and the
team itself.
A project is more than just code.
I host binarycloud at
Tigris, and have pretty good experiences with them.
I always disliked SourceForge (binarycloud started there) because of
its atrociously bad design and inflexibility. Later, their policies
decended into the ludicrous and I found Tigris to be a lot more
reasonable.
I think what would be better than a service like SourceForge or Tigris
would just be a cheap hosting company that offered:
CVS (pserver)
SSH1/2 shell to a VirtBSD or Linux
Apache w/ Tomcat, PHP, Perl, Py, Tcl
Database (MySQL, Postgres)
MLM + Interface
Simple News Post w/XML Syndication
Simple File Upload/Mgmt
ViewCVS (via chora)
Issue Tracking... Bugzilla (for the moment)
Basic User/Membership Management
I'm thinking of doing that once binarycloud r2 is out, sort of as a
side business. It would require a certain amount of work as all of the
tools aren't quite there, but certainly with a bit of work one coule
make it all happen.