Submitted by Google has created a repository system for software development much like SourceForge. The system even checks new project names against SourceForge’s database to ensure no one sets up conflicting names. Greg Stein, an open source engineer within Google and chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, said: “We really like SourceForge, and we don’t want to hurt SourceForge or take away projects.” Instead, Stein says that the goal is to see what Google can do with the Google infrastructure, to provide an alternative for open source projects.
Let’s face it, geeks do most of their work for the pure fun and challenge of it, but geeks like recognition too. (And why not?) Some of them would love the sheer street cred of having Google host their open source project as opposed to Sourceforce, or other alternatives. In addition, Google will most certainly outshine SF in areas other than pure name recognition (I’m quite curious to see what Google is planning with this.) All of this could spell doom to SF, if not for the paradoid and over-zeleous (both of which there are many), who might see this as yet another move for Net Dominace, and prefer to stick with what they know.
In addition, Google will most certainly outshine SF in areas other than pure name recognition
Not very difficult. Sourceforge is probably the worst designed web app.
Google is becoming too big. Will they honor our trust or sell it to the highest bidder?
The digital world can be divided in two halves: code and data. They already keep tabs on our data/information. Now they want us to let them keep our code too?
We need more independent actors. Not fewer ones. That would help the SourceForge “slowness” issues too. (One site to rule them all… yeah, great idea!)
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Google may be benevolent now, but we don’t know what the future will bring.
Edited 2006-07-27 23:47
You can always keep a local copy of your code…and you still retain the copyright over the code. The worst Google could do is delete your project, in which case you simply post it elsewhere, such as Sourceforge.
There are risks in placing too much trust in one large company. To put things in perspective, SourceForge, should they somehow go evil, could add Bonzi buddy to all their downloads. Google, on the other hand, could do bad things with a lot more precision, and the large number of watchful eyes and critical minds the OSS community prides itself of wouldn’t help much.
“We need more independent actors”
What do you think Google entering is. It’s one more actor. More choices are usually a good thing.
Even if Google drives Sourceforge out of the “market” and we end up with the same number of providers as before, at least we have a better system in the end.
And I’m pretty sure this new competition will lead to improvements in Sourceforge, too.
And just to calm down the doomsday prophets a little bit.
From the FAQ:
“Code.google.com is our site for external developers interested in Google-related development. It’s where we’ll publish free source code and lists of our API services.”
Google-related seems to be the key here.
I think right now the main motivation for Google is the featured project. It has to use the Google API and it is probably a nice motivation for people to be the developer of the featured project.
So I think they will get some nice Google specific development afford wich they can use and it might also be a nice additional recruiting platform.
Edited 2006-07-28 08:32
Is Google healthy, complementary competition, or is it becoming a threat to diversity? I believe it is the latter. You might see one more player entering the market. I predict another outcome, not because SourceForge is bad, (I think their service is stunning, all things considered), but because Google has such a following in the OSS world. But not everyone who gives you sweets is a friend.
The main issue is not whether or not Google’s service will be better, or whether or not SourceForge will survive. It’s about what Google -could- do in the future with all the combined control they will have.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so we should help Google compete with Microsoft, right? Wrong. We need people-driven infrastructure, true communities. The original Internet promise of a free, civic sector, beyond government, businesses and academia.
Sourceforge is pretty much a nightmare. Just posting files is the biggest PITA compared to advertising sites like freshmeat and gnomefiles (to be fair, they don’t host your files, but just links).
And the site seems to always be slow…
“We really like SourceForge, and we don’t want to hurt SourceForge or take away projects.”
Hah. Of course you don’t want to intentionally “hurt” SourceForge or “take away projects.” However, you KNOW you are going to, which is why you post the disclaimer in the first place.
It’s not exactly rocket-science to figure out a google-hosted source code repository with a nice interface and well designed system for managing projects will destroy SF.
So, maybe it would have been more appropriate for the designer to simply say a nice thank you to SF and let them pass into the sunset quietly, instead of drawing attention to their inevitable demise. Oh wait, did he intend to do that? Food for thought…
If google releases a service which does sourceforge’s job better, why shouldn’t developers switch? They lack many features (like tarball releases) right now so we will have to wait and see the effect of this, but as someone who often ends up downloading code from sourceforge, I would love to see a better service.
Because some of them will switch simply because it’s Google, not because it’s better.
Maybe Gaim should switch over then, they already have the google summer of code sponsorships and maybe Google themselves could pick up on the development and add all the video and voice support that has been needed for a long time (one of the only reasons I still keep windows around is for Yahoo messenger’s voice/webcam support)
SourceForge is NOT that horrible, as some would make it out to be. Uploading files, updating news and the mini-forums are a bit unorthodox (double-edged sword of web app design), but definitely not a plague upon man.
As for Google, I think SourceForge has more street-cred in the FOSS world, since they’ve always been there and never hassled the users (although unexpected downtime is annoying). Also SF does not scan your emails to extract marketing information or passively comply with Chinese Censorship laws. Maybe this will lead to better maintaince on SFs part. The past problems with the CVS servers were worrying, but their recently setup SVN servers stayed up and work great.
Well, they do make it a bit hard for the devs.
Renaming the CVS-hosts once every half year, means you have either throw your CVS-tree away or modify every CVS-dir to point to the new host, but first you need to figure out that they switched.
They manage to lose cronjobs once in a while so automatic builds stops working when you least expect it.
Also their web leaves a lot to be desired.
OTOH, I ain’t complaining as it’s a free service and a wonderful way of having your projects open for others to participate in.
The trouble with sourceforge is that it is not so reliable as it used to be, I’ve had many a time where I try to commit or update and get told that the site is down.
It’s funny that people complain about Sourceforge, yet forget it’s free. Have we become so spoiled by sites like SF that we’ve forgotten it’s a privilege and not a right?
It’s funny that people complain about Sourceforge, yet forget it’s free. Have we become so spoiled by sites like SF that we’ve forgotten it’s a privilege and not a right?
<sarcasm>Yeah, let’s just pretend that we don’t care about usability, broken stats, or X or Y or Z just because it’s free.</sarcasm>
Seriously, I hope that another ‘big name’ free repository motivates a healty competition and leads to improvements at sourceforge et al.
Edited 2006-07-28 19:30
Could this be Google’s response to Codeplex (Microsoft’s shared source program)?
In addition to this article not having anyting to do with Operating System News, a handful of other linked in articles also appear to be from Slashdot, and just a irrelevant.
Hmmm yeah kinda right – although Im actually hoping for the opposite.
More diversity on OSnews – Im sick of reading another article or blog or … on Apple .. if Linux sucks or whatever .
Id prefer less stuff but higher quality with quality comments – a la lwn – okay OSn is volunteer work & we have the recent OSalternatives articles – much appreciated & today a review by Eugenia –
As much as Google has the positive Google-Glow – they are still a company which biggest interest at the end of the day must be money .
Therefore Id prefer for sourceforge to improve things for users than Google to become a hoover for projects just because they have the money & huge infrastructure to do so .
Is diversity really needing for project hosting ?
Post Scribblings : Virtual point to jonas.kirilla for above comment from me – good comment IMO
Just tried to add a project to it. Google Code Hosting requires GMail account, not Google account. I followed the “create GMail account link” and got “For beta testers only”, which as everyone knows essentially means “Go away, invitations only”
So much for OpenSource hosting.
Screw you guys, I’m going home. ™
Let me know your email address and I’ll send you an invite.
I don’t think I know anyone who isn’t in the position to ask someone for an invite to GMail – most people have 100.
Let me know your email address and I’ll send you an invite.
I don’t think I know anyone who isn’t in the position to ask someone for an invite to GMail – most people have 100.
I am offered invites on ocasions but just can’t stand that whole “i am special, I am granted access” thing. I am special enough on my own.
Google account seems to work fine for Blogger and other places. Can’t believe they make free developers go beg for Gmail invites.
I don’t think having a Gmail account makes you special, and indeed I do not think that is the reason to keep it invite only. I think it is a good networking device. Whether it is by accident or not, but its a useful way to give people your email address (if they don’t already have an account), and it probably helps get rid of automated signups.
And lastly, who doesn’t know someone with a gmail account. I have 2 with 100 invites each. Its not as if they are really trying to keep it exclusive. Lats I heard they had about 8-9 million users, and assuming each of those has 100 invites, that like 800-900 millions addresses they could have. Not really such a plan for exclusivity. And its still in beta anyway, but i think they should stick to the invite system.
it is damn UGLY! and most of the hosted “projects” look like the owner just post them to see if the system works.
In the other hand I really like the “Google’s Imperial Grand Strategy” of taking market share(or audience, in this case) by hosting “hello world” sites (called beta by them)…this is a marketing and social engineering genius
Sorry I am a GForge fan…I really like it because it works and you can have the source code to extend it, could not be the best webapp out there but it can be AJAX-ified…