

Berlios closing down - ethereal
http://developer.berlios.de/forum/forum.php?forum_id=37450

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mhd
Does that mean that a whole bunch of unmaintained projects are vanishing into
limbo?

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_ak
You say that as if it were a bad thing.

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mhd
Call me Cassandra, but I bet in 2013, while sitting in front of a Linux box
I'll wonder whether there isn't an utility that does all that I need from
GnomeFooBarBarella without 2.7 gigs of dependencies, and then the link to it
goes to berlios…

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macavity23
It's a shame, because they had a great service, but it's very hard for them to
generate buzz nowadays as they have been very much overshadowed by github.

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mhd
By github? Berlios was overshadowed by savannah.gnu.org and sourceforge. If
you're talking about github or even Google Code, it's not just buzz…

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streptomycin
berlios actually overshadowed sourceforge for a while, back when sourceforge
was stuck with CVS as the only option for an ungodly long period of time.

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stfu
"It hurts us all the more that we are forced to discontinue the hosting for
BerliOS by 31.12.2011." Is hosting for something like that really so much of
an issue? I would have expected Frauenhofer to have plenty of serverspace
around to keep it up for a little longer.

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ramereth
Its probably a situation where their contract with the facility/server space
runs out on that date.

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_ak
The question is: is Jörg Schilling (who maintained BerliOS) now unemployed
because FOKUS decided to close BerliOS, or do they close it down because Jörg
Schilling left FOKUS and nobody's interested in maintaining the mess he left
behind? (j/k)

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0x12
Do you always joke at funerals?

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wazoox
Isn't a couple of servers enough to host such a service? This is the matter of
80€/month... (at least this is what I'm paying right now for 2 i5 servers with
1Gb/s unlimited traffic and 1TB mirrored drives).

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rb2k_
Yes, but it's the Fraunhofer Society... I worked there for a little bit and
you really notice that it's partially state owned and usually full of people
trying to get their PhD and then leave. That also means that they get funding
for writing papers, not for actually maintaining something.

That also might be why they have the weird chart on the frontpage
(<http://i.imgur.com/TTSFn.png>), it's probably straight out of some report
:-/

I guess my 'rant' kind of shows how annoying I think this kind of institution
is when it comes to dealing with something as quickly moving and interesting
as the internet. Although they employ a lot of people and have a large sum of
money, they don't seem to be able to create any of the cool things people
actually use or really innovate. The main focus is usually on something that
they're able to sell to somebody managing somewhere at the State. Something
like "we're developing the next b2b exchange format for selling services in
the cloud." This usually means writing a lot of papers and reports and
projects, looking for somebody big in the industry to 'work with' and then
releasing a somewhat crappy demo implementation of it that then dies after the
last paper has been written.

Sorry about the rant, I somehow get annoyed when I see that much time and
money being wasted. I'm sure they do some cool stuff, but the majority of it
just seems like a fire to throw money into.

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gjmveloso
Nowdays, open source repos providers should be a mix of community engagement
initiative and real business. Like GitHub and BitBucket.

