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Google Announces Open Source Repository
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Jul 27, 2006 03:48 PM
from the competing dept.
from the competing dept.
NewsForge (also owned by OSTG) has word of Google's newest product: an open-source project repository. Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier sat down for a talk with Greg Stein and Chris DiBona, who say that the product is very similar to sites like SourceForge but is not intended to compete with them. From the article: "Instead, Stein says that the goal is to see what Google can do with the Google infrastructure, to provide an alternative for open source projects. DiBona says that it's a 'direct result of Greg concentrating on what open source projects need. Most bugtrackers are informed by what corporations' and large projects need, whereas Google's offering is just about what open source developers need. Stein says that Google's hosting has a 'brand new look' at issue tracking that may be of interest to open source projects, and says 'nobody else out there is doing anything close to it.'"
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Google Announces Open Source Repository
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SourceForge is easy to beat (Score:5, Insightful)
If Google provides decent uptime--which seems likely given their infrastructure--then they'll already have SourceForge beat on the most important metric. If the service actually innovates and provides some unique value, well that's just a bonus.
Re:SourceForge is easy to beat (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.lbcpc.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 12 2003, @05:30PM)
Have you seen their slogan?
Release early, release often
Re:SourceForge is easy to beat (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.deepnines.com/)
Re:SourceForge is easy to beat (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday October 19, @09:21PM)
I investigated using the enterprise version of sourceforge about a year ago. We looked at the source code (from before they closed it) and decided it was a horrible mess and poorly designed. They may have cleaned it up after they closed it, but I wasn't impressed.
If google can do something better, they should.
Re:SourceForge is easy to beat (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://nickstallman.net/)
SourceForge has ads? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.theroughnecks.net/)
Re:SourceForge is easy to beat (Score:5, Insightful)
On a different topic, for all the times that people complain that Slashdot is posting topics that are in their best interest, topics like this show me this isn't the case. Since OSTG owns both Sourceforge and Slashdot, this posting goes against their financial best interest. They have exposed their huge audience to a competitor.
Reluctantly, I find myself agreeing (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://code.google.com/p/nmod/)
I have had numerous problems with services going offline, each time it's been annoying. recently I couldn't access the web page admin, so I haven't been able to update the site to reflect a new version of my software. As I've been working on the new release for a couple of months, this is a major issue for me.
Plus you now have to pay to get the very best service. I can't afford this, so I'm stuck with the less able service. They claim the normal free service is unnaffected, but I have my doubts. Even when everythings working it's not especially easy to use, and I don't much like some of the changes to the site they've added of late.
Their intentions may be good, and I do understand the need for funding, but non paying users are being effected, regardless of their intent. Paying users get better project admin options/tools too, and I'd rather like that. I'm a poor student though, such things are outside of my budget. I must say sourceforge has lost its appeal for me of late because of these things.
I think I may give google a try, and tramline the two for a while.
That's the open source way, the superior product survives based on how good it is.
Re:Reluctantly, I find myself agreeing (Score:5, Informative)
(http://sitetheory.com/ | Last Journal: Friday October 24 2003, @10:59AM)
Re:Reluctantly, I find myself agreeing (Score:5, Informative)
I'm an architect at SourceForge.net and I designed and implemented the search functionality that is currently running on the site. I take any complaints about the quality of the search results quite seriously. From I've seen, most of our users are quite happy with the latest revision of the search engine (launched in April of this year). However, if you could give me specific search terms that are returning poor results and some examples of what you think it should be returning I'd be happy to look into it to see if there is a bug in the search or statistics engines producing the poor results. My SF.net username is the same as my
Thanks,
--Chris
Re:Reluctantly, I find myself agreeing (Score:4, Informative)
Why is "Moon Secure Antivirus", with rank at 28,000, no files, 0 downloads, registered this year, and only 82% activity considered more relevant than ClamAV?
That's just not helpful! I'd rather not see something that has zero downloads but has more occurances of "antivirus" in the description (or whatever contributed to the relevancy score).
Yes, I can change the sort order. But why make me jump through hoops to wade throug these low-quality projects?
Re:Reluctantly, I find myself agreeing (Score:4, Informative)
Thanks for pointing that out. I'll admit, Moon Secure Antivirus might not be the best candidate for the first result, but the result set returned isn't that bad. ClamAV is the second result and it appears to me that several other results on the first page are pretty good. And in this case it looks like the differentiator was simply that Moon Secure AV has "antivirus" in their project description more often.
We are looking for ways to improve how we rank the relevancy of a project. Before your post I hadn't thought about using the registration date as a metric. Making projects listed on the site longer more relevant by a little bit isn't a bad idea and I may try playing with the tuning settings on my development machine to see what happens.
I do think saying we're making you jump through hoops is a little over the top, the results don't seem to me to be as bad as you're making them out to be. And the improved UI makes it easy for you to scan the results and reject them the way you did. But I certainly don't want to downplay your problems, so please keep providing feedback so we can continue to improve the site. The development team is very motivated to make the user experience on SourceForge.net as good as we possibly can.
--Chris
SourceForge, we hardly knew ye (Score:5, Funny)
(http://forechecker.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday September 07, @08:16PM)
I guess they mean that in the sense that the Pittsburgh Steelers aren't intended to compete with an intramural squad playing in a park. Shall we start the SourceForge countdown clock?
Re:SourceForge, we hardly knew ye (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Tuesday December 09 2003, @02:47AM)
More words missing from the original post (Score:4, Funny)
No Public Domain (Score:5, Interesting)
Although its not a license per se, it might be nice to add that option for those projects that choose to go that route.
Re:No Public Domain (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No Public Domain (Score:4, Interesting)
What the catch? (Score:2)
(http://www.creimer.ws/ | Last Journal: Friday January 26 2007, @12:40PM)
What a pity (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://nummog.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday July 27 2006, @04:02PM)
I know google has done amazing things with stuff like webmail (gmail DESTROYS any previous webmail I have used in terms of features/functionality/speed/storage space, so much so that I haven't tried another since and doubt I ever will - if google decided to charge $10 a month for the gmail service I'd pay it in a heartbeat - it's that good
Still, I'm sure it will be all AJAXy and perdy, maybe faster than sf.net and maybe I'll even choose them over sf.net the next time I can be bothered starting an OSS project.
Re:What a pity (Score:4, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday October 08 2004, @04:53AM)
On to problem areas for open source in general:
- Problem report to patched, committed source with commit comment. The path is LONG - even if you have a checked out tree, you'll need to save the patch, switch windows, cd to an appropriate directory, run a patch command, run a commit command, and write a commit message.
- Ability to integrate automated testing on commit. This is possible, yet it's an utter pain in most version control systems. (Aegis gets it mostly right, of course, as this was the original reason for Aegis).
- Project search is difficult, even including SF.net and Freshmeat and Freshports and pkgsrc and Debian package metadata and CPAN and
...
- The problem report/issue tracking systems I know of are icky to use for large projects. (They're icky for small, too, but there the ickyness doesn't matter much)
- There is no way to mark up code with discussions a la a Wiki.
- There's no easy way to mark up code for high quality UML output, so people can get into projects quickly
- Every project end up setting up their own infrastructure for archiving chat logs
- Mailing list archive search is icky, and this is necessary to find why what happened. (This may, unfortunately, always end up being icky.)
- There's no (perceived as) reliable, scalable version control system that handle distributed branching/development.
I can write up points for hours - and have. Unfortunately, my last try at dealing with many of these issues (http://www.rubyarchive.org, presently so defunct that the Wiki has been spammed almost out of existence) ended up being sabotaged, and I'm sort of demotivated towards doing any more tries...Eivind.
Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.askf1.com/)
I, for one, welcome our new overl[b]oooooo[/b]rds.
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.askf1.com/)
And that, kids, is why we use the 'Preview' button. Durr.
I was going to say that without ads it was nice... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was looking around http://code.google.com/ [google.com] when I took a look at the "Featured Projects". Pirate Island is a blatent advertisement for Dead Man's Chest, though it looks like a legit project until you go to the site. Google also did some bullshit like that with the Davinci Code too. I don't care if they want to advertise it. I have a big problem when they try to trick their users into thinking it's useful content.
Re:I was going to say that without ads it was nice (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky? (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, I happen to think that's a good thing, ye scurvey dogs, ye.
Brand new look? (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Friday August 31, @07:08PM)
Call me a cynic but I think this is just a way to get more ad revenue. Kudos for them and all, but their offering better be *far* better than Berlios, GNU Savannah and SF.net for people to sign up.
Re:Brand new look? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://wonko.com/)
* checks SourceForge again
Yep, same issues still there. SourceForge might get the job done, but it's not exactly getting the job done well, and they don't appear to have any interest in improving things.
By the way, Google isn't running ads on the Google Code pages. This isn't about ad revenue.
but is it open source (Score:2, Funny)
Actual news on slashdot (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.cubiclemuses.com/)
Greg just mentioned that a downloads features will be coming to Google Code Hosting.
Next: Googledot? (Score:5, Funny)
It's all about the issue tracker (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.metis-rs.net/ | Last Journal: Wednesday January 15 2003, @04:37PM)
I use JIRA [atlassian.com] for my issue tracking now, and I couldn't be happier. Looking at Google's current offering, I probably won't be switching anytime soon.
pretty spartan (Score:2, Insightful)
(http://rootsmith.ca/)
Read the FAQ (Score:5, Interesting)
http://code.google.com/hosting/faq.html [google.com]
Let's see what they do (Score:5, Informative)
(http://web-weasel.livejournal.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday August 02 2006, @07:32PM)
It will be interesting to see what direction they take it.
Re:Let's see what they do (Score:5, Insightful)
http://pages.google.com/ [google.com]
They have the majority of the code and infrastructure in place in Google Pages. From there, it's a matter of integration.
Alternative Site (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.bytemycode.com/)
One of the best things they could do is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Granted, this is easier said than done, but it seems like reporting a bug or issue, or just providing feedback is a MAJOR hassle. Having to "sign up" and "have an account" just to report a problem is a pain, and then on top of that, having to navigate a labrynthine website to hopefully end up at the right place - I imagine that it turns away a lot of people who just don't have the time or energy to deal with it.
p is projects (Score:2)
(http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/ | Last Journal: Wednesday January 26 2005, @07:17PM)
Beating SF ... (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://wilmer.gaast.net/)
Re:Beating SF ... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.sourceforge.net/)
Chris diBona eh? (Score:1)
(http://www.madjo.nl/ | Last Journal: Sunday July 27 2003, @10:16AM)
Seems to be broken, a bit (Score:1)
I don't know how ready the service is for use yet. I've just tried to create a project for hosting the stuff I presently use a VM for at home, and twice it's failed. Each time I get a 502 error; when I attempt to redo the creation, I'm told I can't use the name I had previously picked (presumably it's partially in use).
Anyone had success in the last hour or so, creating a project?
Ugh (Score:2)
(http://tocm.blogspot.com/)
Centralized revision control is so 2002
Downloads (Score:3, Insightful)
At random, look at this project:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ftimes/ [sourceforge.net]
You click on download...but you get taken off to some other page where you can download, seperately, some of the source files.
Whining (Score:4, Insightful)
Now they just need some OSS naming... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Google Repository for Open-Source Software
Or perhaps Google Open-source Repository Project [wikipedia.org].
From their FAQ (Score:1, Offtopic)
(http://www.houghi.org/)
So it is indeed nothing like SourForge where anybody can place their code.
SF (Score:1)
So far, no luck (Score:1)
(http://doktorseven.wordpress.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday December 27 2005, @07:06PM)
Could be that I just suck at subversion (entirely possible), but meh.
SourceForge.net and Google Code (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.sourceforge.net/)
maybe google will even remember that i'm logged in (Score:3, Funny)
(http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/ | Last Journal: Wednesday January 26 2005, @07:17PM)
One huge improvement over SF (Score:4, Insightful)
Confusied (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/)
They are all hosted at SourceForge, have identical googlified home pages, but don't look to be "owned" by Google (and why would Google host their own projects at SF, anyway?).
What gives? Are they community projects of some kind that have Google's blessing and branding?
Microsoft monopoly a good thing? (Score:5, Interesting)
(https://customer.lylix.net/aff.php?aff=006)
Re:Microsoft monopoly a good thing? (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/)
IBM don't invest in Linux out of philanthropy, and they don't do it to "get at" Microsoft. They invest because Linux is a huge cash-cow, IBM knows how to milk it, and thus it makes them large amounts of cash. And that's what matters to a big company. They make money, we get something like a billion dollars a year invested in Linux, and everybody's happy.
Except MS. But that's their problem ;o)
Chris DiBona and SourceForge non-compete? (Score:3, Funny)
(http://www.simpy.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday April 15 2003, @12:58PM)
No Disclaimer? (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://gameloop.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Monday December 19 2005, @06:08PM)
Isn't it generally policy to note such potential conflicts of interest?
Yay! (Score:1, Redundant)
(Last Journal: Monday April 25 2005, @07:47PM)
Sourceforge quality (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.ki.se/ | Last Journal: Tuesday August 28, @07:06AM)
I have a collegue who is one of the submittors to JRuby. He told me they had huge problems with Sourceforge last 6 months. Servers were down all the time, which slowed down development. I blieve they almost didn't get the demo finished before Java ONE because of this, and now they have moved to CodeHaus [codehaus.org] instead. Subversion, JIRA for bug tracking, and so far very stable servers, so they are very pleased.
Feature I Need: Migrate Project from Sourceforge (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://purl.org/hritcu/homepage)
Of course, since it is Google... (Score:1)
Perhaps this is to discourage FOSS developers from using their Gmail accounts as CVS.
Re:Wait wait (Score:1)
Re:One word... (Score:2)
On the other hand, I'd have said the same about AOL, too.
Not that I'm arguing with the decision--it's good to have multiple repositories in case one goes down.