Type of site | Free hosting for open-source software project management |
---|---|
Owner | Slashdot Media (2019–present) [1] BIZX, LLC (2016–2019) [2] DHI Group, Inc. (2012–2016) Geeknet, Inc. (1999–2012) |
Created by | VA Software |
Key people | Logan Abbott (President) [3] [4] |
URL | sourceforge |
Commercial | Yes |
Registration | Optional (required for creating and joining projects) |
Launched | November 1999 |
Current status | Online |
SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirroring of downloads for load balancing, a wiki for documentation, developer and user mailing lists, user-support forums, user-written reviews and ratings, a news bulletin, micro-blog for publishing project updates, and other features.
SourceForge was one of the first to offer this service free of charge to open-source projects. [5] [ discuss ] Since 2012, the website has run on Apache Allura software. SourceForge offers free hosting and free access to tools for developers of free and open-source software.
As of September 2020 [update] , the SourceForge repository claimed to host more than 502,000 projects and had more than 3.7 million registered users. [6]
SourceForge is a web-based source code repository. It acts as a centralized location for free and open-source software projects. It was the first to offer this service for free to open-source projects. Project developers have access to centralized storage and tools for managing projects, though it is best known for providing revision control systems such as CVS, SVN, Bazaar, Git and Mercurial. [7] Major features (amongst others) [8] include project wikis, metrics and analysis, access to a MySQL database, and unique sub-domain URLs (in the form http://project-name.sourceforge.net
).
The vast number of users at SourceForge.net (over three million as of 2013) [9] exposes prominent projects to a variety of developers and can create a positive feedback loop. As a project's activity rises, SourceForge.net's internal ranking system makes it more visible to other developers through SourceForge directory and Enterprise Directory. [10] [11] Given that many open-source projects fail due to lack of developer support, exposure to such a large community of developers can continually breathe new life into a project. [ citation needed ]
SourceForge's traditional revenue model is through advertising banner sales on their site. In 2006 SourceForge Inc. reported quarterly takings of US$6.5 million. [12] In 2009 SourceForge reported a gross quarterly income of US$23 million through media and e-commerce streams. [13] In 2011 a revenue of US$20 million was reported for the combined value of the SourceForge, slashdot and freecode holdings, prior to SourceForge's acquisition. [14]
Since 2013 additional revenue generation schemes, such as bundleware models, [15] have been trialled, with the goal of increasing SourceForge's revenue. The result has in some cases been the appearance of malware bundled with SourceForge downloads. [16] On February 9, 2016, SourceForge announced they had eliminated their DevShare program practice of bundling installers with project downloads. [17]
Negative community reactions to the partnership program led to a review of the program, which was nonetheless opened up to all SourceForge projects on February 7, 2014. [18] [19] The program was canceled by new owners BIZX, LLC on February 9, 2016; [20]
On May 17, 2016, they announced that it would scan all projects for malware and display warnings on downloads. [21]
SourceForge, founded in 1999 by VA Software, was the first provider of a centralized location for free and open-source software developers to control and manage software development and offering this service without charge. [5] The software running the SourceForge site was released as free software in January 2000 [22] [23] and was later named SourceForge Alexandria. [24] The last release under a free license was made in November 2001; [25] after the dot-com bubble, SourceForge was later powered by the proprietary SourceForge Enterprise Edition, a separate product re-written in Java [26] [27] which was marketed for offshore outsourcing. [28]
SourceForge has been temporarily banned in China three times: in September 2002, [29] in July 2008 (for about a month) [30] [31] and on August 6, 2012 (for several days).
In November 2008, SourceForge was sued by the French collection society Société civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SPPF) for hosting downloads of the file sharing application Shareaza. [32]
In 2009 SourceForge announced a new site platform known as Allura, which would be an extensible, open source platform licensed under the Apache License, utilizing components such as Python and MongoDB, and offering REST APIs. [33] In June 2012 the Allura project was donated to the Apache Software Foundation as Apache Allura. [34] [35]
In September 2012 SourceForge, Slashdot, and Freecode were acquired from Geeknet by the online job site Dice.com for $20 million, and incorporated into a subsidiary known as Slashdot Media. [36] [37] In July 2015 Dice announced that it planned to sell SourceForge and Slashdot, [38] and in January 2016 the two sites were sold to the San Diego-based BIZX, LLC for an undisclosed amount. [39] In December 2019, BIZX rebranded as Slashdot Media. [1]
On September 26, 2012, it was reported that attackers had compromised a SourceForge mirror, and modified a download of phpMyAdmin to add security exploits. [40]
In July 2013, SourceForge announced that it would provide project owners with an optional feature called DevShare , which places closed-source ad-supported content into the binary installers and gives the project part of the ad revenue. [41] Opinions of this new feature varied; some complained about users not being as aware of what they are getting or being able to trust the downloaded content, whereas others saw it as a reasonably harmless option that keeps individual projects and users in control. [42]
In November 2013, GIMP, a free image manipulation program, removed its download from SourceForge, citing misleading download buttons that potentially confuse customers as well as SourceForge's own Windows installer, which bundles potentially unwanted programs with GIMP. In a statement, GIMP called SourceForge a "once useful and trustworthy place to develop and host FLOSS applications" that now faces "a problem with the ads they allow on their sites". [43] [44] [45]
In response to the DevShare adware, many users and projects migrated to GitHub, other software hosting facilities, or self-hosting. [46] [47] In May 2015, SourceForge took control of pages for five projects that had migrated to other hosting sites and replaced the project downloads with adware-laden downloads, including GIMP. [48] This came despite SourceForge's commitment in November 2013 to never bundle adware with project downloads without developers' consent. [49] [50]
On June 1, 2015, SourceForge claimed that they had stopped coupling "third party offers" with unmaintained SourceForge projects. [51] Since this announcement was made, a number of other developers have reported that their SourceForge projects had been taken over by SourceForge staff accounts (but have not had binaries edited), including nmap [50] [52] and VLC media player. [53] On June 18, 2015, SourceForge announced that SourceForge-maintained mirrored projects were removed and anticipated the formation of a Community Panel to review their mirroring practices. [54] No such Community Panel ever materialized, but SourceForge discontinued DevShare and the bundling of installers after SourceForge was sold to BizX in early 2016. [55] [56] [57] On May 17, 2016, SourceForge announced that they were now scanning all projects for malware and displaying warnings on projects detected to have malware. [58]
Since 2002, SourceForge has featured a pair of Projects of the Month, one chosen by its community and the other by its staff, but these have not been updated since December 2020. [59]
As of May 2013 [update] , the SourceForge repository hosted more than 300,000 projects and had more than 3 million registered users, [60] although not all were active. The domain sourceforge.net attracted at least 33 million visitors by August 2009 according to a Compete.com survey. [9]
In its terms of use, [61] SourceForge states that its services are not available to users in countries on the sanction list of the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (including Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria). Since 2008 the secure server used for making contributions to the site has blocked access from those countries. In January 2010, the site had blocked all access from those countries, including downloads. Any IP address that appeared to belong to one of those countries could not use the site. [62] By the following month, SourceForge relaxed the restrictions so that individual projects could indicate whether or not SourceForge should block their software from download to those countries. [63] This, however, had been reversed by November 2020 for North Korea and other countries. [64] Crimea has been blocked since February 1, 2015. [65] [66] [67] [ better source needed ]
Dev-C++ is a free full-featured integrated development environment (IDE) distributed under the GNU General Public License for programming in C and C++. It was originally developed by Colin Laplace and was first released in 1998. It is written in Delphi.
FileZilla is a free and open-source, cross-platform FTP application, consisting of FileZilla Client and FileZilla Server. Clients are available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Both server and client support FTP and FTPS, while the client can in addition connect to SFTP servers. FileZilla's source code is hosted on SourceForge.
Notepad++ is a free and open-source text and source code editor for use with Microsoft Windows. It supports tabbed editing, which allows working with multiple open files in a single window. The product's name comes from the C postfix increment operator; it is sometimes referred to as npp or NPP.
FontForge is a FOSS font editor which supports many common font formats. Developed primarily by George Williams until 2012, FontForge is free software and is distributed under a mix of the GNU General Public License Version 3 and the 3-clause BSD license. It is available for operating systems including Linux, Windows, and macOS, and is localized into 12 languages.
A source-code-hosting facility is a file archive and web hosting facility for source code of software, documentation, web pages, and other works, accessible either publicly or privately. They are often used by open-source software projects and other multi-developer projects to maintain revision and version history, or version control. Many repositories provide a bug tracking system, and offer release management, mailing lists, and wiki-based project documentation. Software authors generally retain their copyright when software is posted to a code hosting facilities.
GIMPshop was a modification of the free and open source graphics program GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), with the intent to imitate the look and feel of Adobe Photoshop.
File sharing is a method of distributing electronically stored information such as computer programs and digital media. Below is a list of file sharing applications, most of them make use of peer-to-peer file sharing technologies.
Developer's Image Library or DevIL, started by Denton Woods, is a cross-platform image library which aims to provide a common API for different image file formats. It consists of three parts: the main library (IL), the utility library (ILU) and the utility toolkit (ILUT), mirroring the corresponding parts of OpenGL.
Vuze is a BitTorrent client used to transfer files via the BitTorrent protocol. Vuze is written in Java, and uses the Azureus Engine. In addition to downloading data linked to .torrent files, Azureus allows users to view, publish and share original DVD and HD quality video content. Content is presented through channels and categories containing TV shows, music videos, movies, video games, series and others.
In FOSS development communities, a forge is a web-based collaborative software platform for both developing and sharing computer applications.
OSDN is a web-based collaborative development environment for open-source software projects. It provides source code repositories and web hosting services. With features similar to SourceForge, it acts as a centralized location for open-source software developers.
OpenCandy was an adware module and a potentially unwanted program classified as malware by many anti-virus vendors. They flagged OpenCandy due to its undesirable side-effects. It was designed to run during installation of other desired software. Produced by SweetLabs, it consisted of a Microsoft Windows library incorporated in a Windows Installer. When a user installed an application that had bundled the OpenCandy library, an option appeared to install software it recommended based on a scan of the user's system and geolocation. Both the option and offers it generated were selected by default and would be installed unless the user unchecked them before continuing with the installation.
Chrome Web Store is Google's online store for its Chrome web browser. As of 2022, Chrome Web Store hosts about 123,000 extensions and 29,000 themes.
Apache OpenOffice (AOO) is an open-source office productivity software suite. It is one of the successor projects of OpenOffice.org and the designated successor of IBM Lotus Symphony. It was a close cousin of LibreOffice, Collabora Online and NeoOffice in 2014. It contains a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), a presentation application (Impress), a drawing application (Draw), a formula editor (Math), and a database management application (Base).
XigmaNAS is a Network-attached storage (NAS) server software with a dedicated management web interface. It is free software under the terms of the Simplified BSD license.
Apache Allura is an open-source forge software for managing source code repositories, bug reports, discussions, wiki pages, blogs and more for any number of individual projects. Allura graduated from incubation with the Apache Software Foundation in March 2013.
Download Valley is a cluster of software companies in Israel, producing and delivering adware to be installed alongside downloads of other software. The primary purpose is to monetize shareware and downloads. These software items are commonly browser toolbars, adware, browser hijackers, spyware, and malware. Another group of products are download managers, possibly designed to induce or trick the user to install adware, when downloading a piece of desired software or mobile app from a certain source.
A potentially unwanted program (PUP) or potentially unwanted application (PUA) is software that a user may perceive as unwanted or unnecessary. It is used as a subjective tagging criterion by security and parental control products. Such software may use an implementation that can compromise privacy or weaken the computer's security. Companies often bundle a wanted program download with a wrapper application and may offer to install an unwanted application, and in some cases without providing a clear opt-out method. Antivirus companies define the software bundled as potentially unwanted programs which can include software that displays intrusive advertising (adware), or tracks the user's Internet usage to sell information to advertisers (spyware), injects its own advertising into web pages that a user looks at, or uses premium SMS services to rack up charges for the user. A growing number of open-source software projects have expressed dismay at third-party websites wrapping their downloads with unwanted bundles, without the project's knowledge or consent. Nearly every third-party free download site bundles their downloads with potentially unwanted software. The practice is widely considered unethical because it violates the security interests of users without their informed consent. Some unwanted software bundles install a root certificate on a user's device, which allows hackers to intercept private data such as banking details, without a browser giving security warnings. The United States Department of Homeland Security has advised removing an insecure root certificate, because they make computers vulnerable to serious cyberattacks. Software developers and security experts recommend that people always download the latest version from the official project website, or a trusted package manager or app store.
The SourceForge Installer is a discontinued piece of software that was included in some downloads from SourceForge. It was often bundled with adware and crapware designed to trick people into installing unwanted software. SourceForge has been criticized about its use of this installer. Opinions of this feature vary, with some complaining about users not being as aware of what they are getting or being able to trust the downloaded content, whereas others see it as a reasonably harmless option that keeps individual projects and users in control.
Software Corp., late Thursday reported third-quarter net earnings of $6.49 million, or 9 cents a share, up from $997,000, or 2 cents a share, during the year-ago period. Pro forma earnings from continuing operations were $2.1 million, or 3 cents a share, compared with $1.2 million, or 2 cents a share, last year. The Fremont, Calif.-based maker of computer servers and storage systems said revenue for the three months ended April 30 rose to $10.3 million from $7.9 million. Analysts, on average, had forecast a per-share profit of 2 cents on revenue of $12 million.
It's finally here...The Code behind this site is being released under the terms of the GPL.
...around 2002, VA Software decided to junk the entire SourceForge codebase ... as the basis for its proprietary SourceForge Enterprise product, and recode the entire thing from scratch in Java...
SourceForge.net was built ... using popular web scripting languages including PHP, Perl and Python and many Open Source tools and components. ... By contrast, SourceForge Enterprise Edition was architected and built from the ground up ... [with a] Platform-independent J2EE architecture
VA Software Corporation (Nasdaq:LNUX), provider of SourceForge Enterprise Edition ... today announced the release of a product designed to address key challenges related to offshore application development. SourceForge Enterprise Edition 3.5...
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