I don't think they need all the software they host

Posted Aug 13, 2002 16:05 UTC (Tue) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

I think that SourceForge will rather charge for their service than demand license changes or exemptions. If they charge $10 a year, they will lose old, unmaintained projects. If they ask for a license change, they will lose the most active and popular projects.

I personally, would rather pay a yearly hosting fee for an open source project to a system that itself showed a true commitment to open source software, but that's just me. That way, you're paying for the real work and resources that are necessary to maintain the system-- not for proprietary software. A philosophical point, true, but on the other hand, half of the problem of corporate America is that people freely invest their money in things they would have philosophical difficulties with. If whether or not Sourceforge runs on a proprietary system is truly irrelevant to you, then your philosophy is different. That doesn't make people whose philosophy does suggest they should support open source systems over proprietary systems wrongheaded, it just puts them in disagreement with you.

(Even though I sound like it I'm not really a true open source purist, although I'm slowly being pushed that way in reaction to increasingly heavy-handed tacticts from the other side. Mostly, I'm making the argument here in reaction to the arguement that open source pursits are wrongheaded and/or unreasonable; and, I started with a sky-falling slippery slope article that looks back at history to suggest people who claimed a falling sky in the past weren't as wrong as those who made fun of them thought.)

-Rob