
SourceForge Infrastructure and Service Restoration - chippy
http://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-infrastructure-and-service-restoration/
======
nisa
So the post in /r/sysadmin[1] has nothing to do with reality? I guess we'll
have to wait for a post-mortem. I don't want to be in the shoes of the ops
personnel there, I hope everythings turns out fine!

1:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3do9k0/sourceforg...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3do9k0/sourceforge_is_down_due_to_storage_problems_no_eta/ct77o49)

~~~
zatkin
>"We consulted with our storage vendor when forming our next steps."

They didn't mention Extremely Massive Corporation in this blog post.

------
ctvo
As someone who visited Sourforge to download GIMP 7 years ago, why does this
site still exist?

~~~
tobias3
1\. What is the alternative for user facing open source projects? The
icentives for GitHub are even more misaligned as they want to attract
developers and not users. I am wondering how long it takes till they shut down
their binary release feature again, once everyone puts their binary releases
there.

2\. It gave you all the stuff you needed for your project at one place. The
SCM of your choice, mailing lists, hosted forums, wiki, bugtracker, and a
website with PHP/MySQL. They have retired hosted forums, wiki and bugtracker
now.

3\. It increases the discoverability of your project. The project summary page
actually gives a nice overview of the main points of your project such as
licence, category and features; They have things like project of the month,
etc.. Without sourceforge (and freecode) we are at SEO, social media and word
of mouth for open source PR. This is much more effort.

4\. They allow huge binary downloads which can be uploaded with e.g. rsync and
scp.

Loosing all this might be fine for a large project such as GIMP, as they have
the manpower and donation money to do it themselves. For smaller projects this
distracts from developing the project.

~~~
moonchrome
>1\. What is the alternative for user facing open source projects? The
icentives for GitHub are even more misaligned as they want to attract
developers and not users. I am wondering how long it takes till they shut down
their binary release feature again, once everyone puts their binary releases
there.

At this point I have to wonder - why not have a paid download service for OSS
builds - like 1-2$ or whatever symbolic price minimum - this will probably
cover the download costs and maybe leave your project some tiny bit of cash.

At the same time provide a free build link on torrents so that your users can
access it trough torrents if they don't want to pay - it doesn't cost you
anything (even the bandwidth if your project is hosted on something like GH
pages).

So you pay 1-2$ for convenience or go download trough torrents or if you can't
use torrents and you're brave search google for mirrors.

~~~
JohnTHaller
The simple answer is that 98% of users won't pay it.

Source: I manage an open source project used by a few million people.

~~~
espadrine
98% seems like a very generous user-base. Getting 20k$ from the 2% in your
million users would maintain the download server for at least twenty years.

I assume it's much lower than 2%, which would fit my experience. From about a
thousand users (a conservative estimate), I get around 10m$/user on average,
and 0.3% of paying users.

~~~
justizin
And the SFLC will help you to create the onerous organization you need in
order to collect, possess, and spend that money by committee.

And that is why everyone turns to the ASF for help in this situation, since
they already exist, but that's probably not sustainable.

The answer is not clear.

------
cyberjunkie
I thought this update was some kind of reawakening, where sense had prevailed
and all malware was removed and Sourceforge was returned to its former glory.

I searched for 'malware', 'spam' in the post and found none.

Son, I am disappoint.

