SourceForge goes to DB2 [LWN.net]

Among the many announcements from LinuxWorld this week is this one from VA Software stating that the SourceForge software would be adapted to work with a number of proprietary IBM products, including the DB2 database manager and WebSphere. VA and IBM will also cooperate in the marketing of each other's products. Oh, and, incidentally, OSDN (owned by VA) has announced that SourceForge.net will be converted over to run DB2 exclusively.

This arrangement does not lack its good features. SourceForge becomes more interoperable and gains a new marketing channel. No details have been released, of course, but it is reasonable to expect that IBM will help support SourceForge.net's continued existence as part of this deal. Given the obvious cost of running a facility like SourceForge and the number of free software projects which depend on it, this is good news for the free software community.

The fact remains, however, that SourceForge is moving steadily away from free software. The site itself has not been pure free software for some time, and is now becoming a showcase for IBM's proprietary applications. There has not been a release of the SourceForge site code - the free part - since November, 2001. References to "open source" are most rare on the VA Software web site. Even the VA Software products FAQ shows an interesting emphasis:

Q: What platform (hardware/software) does SourceForge run on?

SourceForge runs on SPARC based Solaris servers using Solaris version 8 10/01 and higher. SourceForge also runs on Red Hat Linux versions 7.1 and higher on Intel processor-based platforms.

"Also runs" is better than nothing...

Almost exactly one year ago, Eric Raymond posted a message on how SourceForge wasn't really going proprietary:

So the real news here is that VA is still about open source -- if I didn't believe that, I'd be off their board of directors so fast it would make your head spin. We're just being pragmatic about how we sell the idea. Change peoples' behavior first, show them the advantages in doing so, and their hearts and minds will follow.

Given that, it is interesting to note that Mr. Raymond's name has been quietly dropped from VA's Board of Directors page.

We are, thus, in a position where a large portion of the free software community's work is hosted on a site owned by a company that no longer sees free software as part of its mission. The concentration of projects onto a single site (any single site) has been a cause of concern for some time; now it makes the community's position look truly precarious. SourceForge is still useful to VA as a demonstration of the scale on which its software can work. But it's an expensive advertisement which is increasingly being turned to the interests of those who are paying the bills. SourceForge remains a valuable contribution to the free software community, as it has been for years. But the need for alternatives (beyond Savannah and Berios, which are a good start) is more urgent than ever.

to post comments

SourceForge goes to DB2

Posted Aug 15, 2002 6:08 UTC (Thu) by mauriceh (guest, #3267) [Link] (2 responses)

This was inevitable
VA is the classic "burn baby" of the dot come era.
They couldn't cut it as hardware builders.
They couldn't cut it as an Open Source company.
Now they just sold out to IBM.

There is a word for people like this:
Whore.

SourceForge goes to DB2

Posted Aug 15, 2002 19:17 UTC (Thu) by jasone (subscriber, #2423) [Link] (1 responses)

Referring to VA as whorish is in my opinion quite unfair. "Misguided" or "shortsighted" might be reasonable descriptive terms, but ultimately, SourceForge has been a continuing gift to the open source community that we shouldn't scoff at. Unfortunately, VA hasn't been able to come up with a sustainable business model to support the gift, but that doesn't make it less of a gift.

That said, I have never been comfortable with trusting SourceForge with my work, precisely because I fear its unsustainable business underpinnings will cause it to go away. Last I checked, there still wasn't a good way to migrate projects (cvs repository, mail logs, bug databases, etc.) back out of SourceForge, which would cause me much anxiety, given the uncertain future of SourceForge.

SourceForge goes to DB2

Posted Aug 18, 2002 3:44 UTC (Sun) by puetzk (guest, #3318) [Link]

I don't know about bug databases and mailing archives, but getting your CVS out of sourceforge (or just backing it up) is quite easy... I've never had occasion to look for the others, but as the CVS HOWTO on sourceforge explains, http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cvstarballs/ contains tarballs of the cvsroot for each project, generated nightly. So that part is not a big deal, other than finding another place to host it that's half as good :-) (end-users note - these are not cvs snapshot tarballs, they are copies of the full repository including all revision history, suitable for setting up a new cvs server with all the old info, not for direct use). -- and no, I have no connection to sourceforge, not even a project hosted on it :-)

SourceForge goes to DB2

Posted Aug 16, 2002 1:00 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

I would love to know what Sourceforge.net used for a database manager and underlying operating system before. The announcement doesn't say.

Deployment of DB2 on Linux is great for Linux credibility. DB2 says to the world that it is a serious application. A company that is not afraid to spend big bucks on proprietary software when it makes business sense nonetheless chooses Linux for the system's core.

SourceForge goes to DB2

Posted Aug 16, 2002 15:18 UTC (Fri) by drfickle (guest, #1093) [Link]

Actually it was more like July 2001 that the SourceForge code has been available. That was when they shut off their anonymous CVS machine for development work. The last official release, 2.5, was released in December of 2000.

SourceForge goes to DB2

Posted Aug 16, 2002 16:46 UTC (Fri) by markhb (guest, #1003) [Link]

According to his resume, ESR left the VA~ Board of Directors on April 2002. I'm not sure whether anyone's head is spinning.

SourceForge goes to DB2

Posted Aug 18, 2002 3:14 UTC (Sun) by chaostrophy (guest, #662) [Link]

The version of SourceForge they sell runs on Bitkeeper, the free version is CVS only. No reason not to make Bitkeeper an option (it would clearly be free for this), it certianly would make the Bitkeeper people happy (or so I recall from the Bitkeeper mailing list some time ago).