Whats up with SourceForge?

Something seems to be up with SourceForge.

I have been using it heavily this week. CVS has been down three times for extended periods. The Admin web site has been down 4 times. This is seriously interrupting me!

There are two possibilities:

  1. This is just a run of bad luck
  2. Sourceforge is underfunded

To explore the second option lets look at the Form 10 filed by VA Software on 12 December 2005.

Sales of Sourceforge software declined from 1.9m to 1.4m. R&D on Sourceforge dropped from .9m to .8m.
Only 136 customers have licensed SourceForge.

Sales from advertising have gone up 36% over the same period.

Overall VA Software had a net loss of 1.2m for the 30 September 2005 quarter.

What is unclear is how much of the advertising revenue comes from sourceforge.net and how much comes from slashdot.org. Based on my own viewing habits I would guestimate that less than 10% comes from sourceforge.net. Running slashdot is much simpler than running sourceforge. Slashdot is a blog. Sourceforge is an entire software development hosting environment complete with compile farms.

So I think the second possibility, underfunding, is the likely reason for the outages. It may also be the cause of the sluggish introduction of subversion, which is about to come out of beta and be generally available, and the long period where project statistics were not available.

It may be there that there is simply not enough money in it.

Having said that, the importance of sourceforge to the open source community cannot be overstated. If they decide to offload it I hope it finds another benevolent home. Sun? O’Reilly? The UN?

By Greg Luck

As Terracotta’s CTO, Greg (@gregrluck) is entrusted with understanding market and technology forces and the business drivers that impact Terracotta’s product innovation and customer success. He helps shape company and technology strategy and designs many of the features in Terracotta’s products. Greg came to Terracotta on the acquisition of the popular caching project Ehcache which he founded in 2003. Prior to joining Terracotta, Greg served as Chief Architect at Australian online travel giant Wotif.com. He also served as a lead consultant for ThoughtWorks on accounts in the United States and Australia, was CIO at Virgin Blue, Tempo Services, Stamford Hotels and Resorts and Australian Resorts and spent seven years as a Chartered Accountant in KPMG’s small business and insolvency divisions. He is a regular speaker at conferences and contributor of articles to the technical press.

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