SourceForge Open-Sources Their Platform Software 58
rick446 writes "In late 2009 SourceForge embarked on a plan to 'reboot' our developer tools on an open platform including Python, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, and SOLR. The result was the Allura platform, and was released under the Apache License in February 2011." Note: Slashdot and SourceForge are both part of Geek.net.
Wait a second.... (Score:1)
You mean it wasn't already?
Re:Wait a second.... (Score:5, Informative)
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Then GForge closed up and was reopenned as fusionforge (http://fusionforge.org)
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Why does copyright matter, if it is GPL'd?
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Nevermind it is Apache, not GPL. I don't know much about that license or why/if that would matter either.
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If you own the copyright, you can relicense it under a different license. If you contribute code to an FSF project, they will require you to sign over the copyright. That's why they could relicense all their code to GPL3 (that and the GPL v2 or later part... but it's now 3 or later). Of course, they could also change to a non-FREE license if they wanted. They probably wouldn't, but .... MySQL (and later Sun) also required copyright assignment, too. Now Oracle can do anything they want with it.
For com
Github replaced it... (Score:1)
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Github replaced iit for some people as a "real forge", but you'll probably find many more mature project on sf..
So as an "advertisement platforme" SF is certainly a good bet for a team...
And anyway the announcement make most sense for people who want to host their own forge, they need the software, not SF users..
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So... (Score:1)
So not to start a flame war or anything, but why would I choose SourceForge to host my project over GitHub or Project Hosting on Google Code?
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Because of the mailing lists? The ones with the terrible archive interface.
I think this new platform may even be worse than the old travesty.
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You probably wouldn't. SF came first, so when Google Code came out it had to have better features to attract users, and it did. Then GitHub, again had to have better features to attract users, and it did. In my view the main improving feature as you jumped from one to the other was better usability.
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Used to be you couldn't use a BSD license on Google Code, but that's apparently changed. My only remaining complaint is that there isn't a good way for me to take a project on Google Code (e.g. "dastoob") and assign a domain to it. I've got dastoob.net set up right now to 301 redirect to the relevant Google Code page.
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I recall not being able to use BSD for the first project I wanted to set up there. That was quite some time ago, though.
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Advertising? (Score:1)
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I thought it was still VA Linux.
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Full disclosure? I see it often when a link to a site affiliated to /. in some businessy manner appears.
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It's considered good practice to make note of an association like that.
Re:Advertising? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes it is called 'full disclosure' - when reporting about a group you have financial ties to you are supposed to disclose that fact.
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So are we supposed to believe that regular slashvertisements don't refer to products Slashdot got big money from?
Yes. Do have evidence that suggests otherwise?
Can you now mirror SourceForge? (Score:2)
Is it possible to mirror SourceForge, retaining all the updates and comments?
For me, this has been eye opening... (Score:3)
...and here's why.
All along, I thought sites like www.slashdot.org ran on some open source database like PostgreSQL with a front end created by PHP.
As the Allura platform shows, it's much more complex than that. The question is...does it have to be this complex?
What would be the short comings of a PostgreSQL/PHP set-up?
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Well, for starters, PHP. *ducks*
But seriously, the chances are that a lot of the complexity in both site's code bases is that it's doing some very interesting and valuable stuff. Sometimes, when code seems over-complicated, it's for a bad reason like performance or bad design. But a lot of other times, it's to deal with the strange edge cases that were discovered after the code was running, or really useful behind-the-scenes features like appropriately distributed mirroring.
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Why do you say that? Depending on what you are doing, even low traffic websites sometimes need message queues. RabbitMQ is a nice implementation of that. The fact that it is good at handling higher loads is only an added benefit.
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Which parts are you finding needlessly complex?
Python and PHP play the same role.
MongoDB and PostgreSQL play the same role.
SOLR is for full text searching, which you might also use in your PHP app.
I have only had a quick look through he code, but it looks like RabbitMQ is used so that mail can be queued and delivered without reliance on the web application. You might consider doing the same in PHP if you have the same requirements.
PHP is extremely difficult to use (Score:1)
Python is far more sane. And please don't flame me about how easy PHP is if you don't know that '5,000' + '5,000' is 10.
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I'm not sure why you replied to me, I wouldn't touch PHP to build a web application with a ten foot pole for a long list of reasons.
With that said, why shouldn't '5,000' + '5,000' equal 10? Most PHP functions are thin wrappers around C functions. strtoi() stops when it hits a non-numeric character, thus '5,000' is 5. 5 + 5 is 10. In that case, the result is fairly logical assuming you understand where PHP came from. There are much bigger problems with the language than that.
By the way, the "." is used for s
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A weekly-updated Git repository of Slashdot's backend is available under the monicker Slashcode [sourceforge.net].
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The problem with a plain vanilla PostgreSQL/PHP is that it doesn't scale well, especially when you're talking about more than just a website. Sure, you can throw more hardware at the problem, but there comes a point where it's more cost-effective to use different backend technology to do the data processing even if you're still using traditional web scripting (Perl, PHP, or even Python or Ruby) for the frontend.
Pure slashvertisement (Score:4, Insightful)
Pure slashvertisement at its best. Really, it is!
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This is totally news, because Mongo is webscale.
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Uh? SF is an important piece of the opensource ecosystem. I find this quite interesting.
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Yes. It's called word derivation.
History of OpenSourcing SF.net (Score:5, Informative)
I work at SourceForge, and can probably describe a bit of the history.
In 1999 when Sourceforge was released, it was conceived as a gift back to the open source community, and was released as open source software. But with the dot com crash, and the successive transformation of VA linux from a hardware company to a software company (VA Software) the then management decided to try out a proprietary software sales strategy, and created SourceForge Enterprise Edition.
While things were proprietary due to that decision, much of the sf.net internal code became very tied up in the specifics of our infrastructure, and in some cases with code that we weren't able to open up.
All of this happened before I came on with SourceForge, and my experience is of a very different company, that has been continually increasing our commitment to give back to open source, and have released a number of smaller projects. And then a year ago we started this new Python based platform, which was intended from day one to be released under an open source license.
Trust me, we know that previous management actions have burned some bridges, but still feel like our obligation today is to do what's right for the site and the community. And I am convinced that the open source community deserves a truly open forge platform, where they can see the code, influence feature decisions, and even self host if that were to become necessary. And I know the current team is very committed to making that happen.
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You forgot to mention that when SF decided to close source their application they took the source code as-is and stole all the work open source developers like myself had contributed to the project. I had started contributing heavily just before they took the source and called it theirs with no reimbursement or acknowledgment to developers like me.
For me SF has no credibility.
allura (Score:1)
If your wanting to be busy I say use it to make politicianforge every single one of them and how they voted and on what and every stupid idea they ever had.
So in short us it to track politicians instead of software.
Im to lazy but liked the idea.
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Been done, in the UK at least. Great resource:
http://www.theyworkforyou.com [theyworkforyou.com]