SourceForge

SourceForge's website and current logo
URL	sourceforge.net or sf.net (redirect)
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	Collaborative revision control and software development management system
Registration	Optional (required for creating and joining projects)
Owner	Dice Holdings, Inc.
Created by	VA Software
Launched	November 1999
Alexa rank	162 (February 2013[update])[1]
Current status	Active

SourceForge is a web-based source code repository. It acts as a centralized location for software developers to control and manage free and open source software development. It was the first to offer that service for free to open source projects.^[2][discuss] The website runs a version of SourceForge Enterprise Edition, forked from the last open-source version available. As of July 2011^[update], the SourceForge repository hosts more than 300,000 projects and has more than 2 million registered users,^[3] although not all are active. The domain sourceforge.net attracted at least 33 million visitors by August 2009 according to a Compete.com survey.^[4]

SourceForge offers free access to hosting and tools for developers of free / open source software, competing with other providers such as GitHub, RubyForge, Tigris.org, BountySource, Launchpad, BerliOS, JavaForge, GNU Savannah, and Gitorious.

Features [edit]

Project developers have access to centralized storage and tools for managing projects, although it is best known for providing revision control systems such as CVS, SVN, Bazaar, Git or Mercurial.^[5] Major features (amongst others)^[6] include project wikis, metrics and analysis, access to a MySQL database, and unique sub-domain URLs (such as http://project-name.sourceforge.net).

The vast number of users at SourceForge.net (over 2,000,000 as of 2009)^[7] 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 who may join and contribute to it. 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.

Banned countries and controversy [edit]

This article's Criticism or Controversy section may compromise the article's neutral point of view of the subject. Please integrate the section's contents into the article as a whole, or rewrite the material. (October 2012)

Error-message seen by someone attempting to access SourceForge from an ITAR-restricted country.

In its terms of use,^[8] 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, access to the secure server (used for making contributions to the site) has been blocked for people from those countries. As of January 2010^[update], all access including downloads is blocked for those users. This means that all people whose IP addresses appear to belong to those countries are prevented from using the site.^[9]

These restrictions have drawn criticism as being counter to the free software movement, the open source software movement and the principles of making software available to all without discrimination.^[10]

Temporary bans in China [edit]

SourceForge.net was banned in China around 2002,^[11] though the ban was later lifted in 2003.^{[citation needed]}

In 2008, SourceForge.net website was banned again in China for about a month (June 26, 2008 – July 24, 2008).^[12][13][14] It is probable that the ban was a result of the "Boycott Beijing 2008" banner placed on Notepad++'s SourceForge.net homepage to point out the human rights problem in China.^{[citation needed]}

On Aug 6, 2012, SourceForge.net was banned again. Several days later the ban was lifted.

Attacks on SourceForge.net [edit]

SourceForge has faced critical attacks on its databases. In 2006, attackers targeted the SourceForge.net database and most of its users were advised to change their passwords in order to remain secure. In December 2007, SourceForge.net was offline for a while due to another attack.^[15] Nobody knew exactly what had happened, since there were no reports about the outage.^{[citation needed]}

On January 27, 2011, SourceForge faced another attempt.^[16] The attack was mainly against some of the developer infrastructure and resulted in the exploitation of several SourceForge.net servers. SourceForge said, "The attack resulted in an exploit of several SourceForge.net servers, and we have proactively shut down a handful of developer centric services to safeguard data and protect the majority of our services"

According to a SourceForge.net announcement on their blog^[17] as a short term response, they have taken down services such as CVS Hosting, ViewVC (web-based code browsing), New Release upload capability, and Interactive Shell services. The company is silent about the type of attack and from where those attempts were made.

On September 26th, 2012 it was announced that attackers compromised a download mirror server for the SourceForge software repository, rigging the installer package for phpMyAdmin, a web based MySQL Server interface, with a backdoor.^[18]

Suit by SCPP [edit]

Société civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SCPP) is an umbrella group for a variety of organizations in France. In November, 2008, SCPP initiated a suit against Sourceforge.net, Vuze, Limewire, and Morpheus for hosting the P2P file-sharing application Shareaza that "facilitates mass copyright infringement".^[19] SourceForge was not sued for hosting copyrighted material itself, but for hosting Vuze.

Apache relicense [edit]

In June 2012, SourceForge released its underlying software, named Allura, under the Apache license which was then accepted by Apache foundation for incubation.^{[20][21][22][23]}

Acquisition [edit]

In September 2012, Dice Holdings acquired SourceForge from its previous owner Geeknet.^[24]

See also [edit]

Free software portal

• CodePlex
• Comparison of open source software hosting facilities
• GitHub
• Google Code Project hosting

References [edit]

External links [edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: SourceForge

• SourceForge.net
• "The SourceForge Story", by James Maguire (2007-10-17)