Berlios to shut down

[Posted September 30, 2011 by corbet]

The operators of the Berlios code repository have announced that it will be shutting down at the end of the year. "Unfortunately, as a research institute Fraunhofer FOKUS has only few opportunities to operate a repository like BerliOS. Such a project will only work with a follow-up financing, or with sponsors or partners taking over the repository. In the field of OSS this is a difficult undertaking. In a recent survey the community indicated some support in funds and manpower which we would like to thank you for. Unfortunately, the result is not enough to put the project on a sustainable financial basis. In addition the search for sponsors or partners was unsuccessful." Berlios has served the community well; it will be missed.

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Berlios to shut down

Posted Sep 30, 2011 18:20 UTC (Fri) by ay (guest, #79347) [Link]

Well, there's always github.

Berlios to shut down

Posted Sep 30, 2011 18:38 UTC (Fri) by jordi (guest, #14325) [Link]

Github doesn't run on free software, which is an important feature for some. Gitorious does.

Berlios to shut down

Posted Sep 30, 2011 23:23 UTC (Fri) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link]

Github is actually maintained, unlike gitorious, which is important to some :)

Read these articles for some great insight into it:
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-scm-interest&m=1276129572...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2972107

The openoffice^Wlibreoffice doc attached to the email in the first link is pure gold as to why gitorious is not a very good platform. It is a real shame it isn't better maintained and managed as a project.

Berlios to shut down

Posted Oct 1, 2011 8:30 UTC (Sat) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]

I've read the references you pointed to and enjoyed them, but for what it's worth none of them suggested to me that Gitorious is not actually maintained. What I read is that contributors can have trouble getting their work in and that the project looks bad when compared to the pleasure to work with that is Sitaram.

Berlios to shut down

Posted Oct 1, 2011 10:03 UTC (Sat) by Sho (guest, #8956) [Link]

As the author of both those links and a contributor to that ODF, nowhere did we intend to make the claim that Gitorious.org is unmaintained (although admittedly, I've seen fairly visible bugs in the web UI linger on for months at times).

Rather what those documents talk about is that the software as-is didn't live up to our specific needs, that we were unhappy with the state of the development community around it and that we had some architectural concerns. All of which should only matter to you if your requirement set matches ours :).

--Eike

Berlios to shut down

Posted Oct 1, 2011 9:27 UTC (Sat) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

The work done by KDE's sysadmins is good research, but realize that it is focusing on KDE's needs. Which are quite unique in terms of scope, amount of control, workflow etcetera.

So while for them, gitorious didn't work, it is fine for a vast majority of FOSS projects.

Berlios to shut down

Posted Oct 2, 2011 16:06 UTC (Sun) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]

For smaller projects, the network effect of Github is a huge advantage. Nearly all my developer friends are on Github, and I see a lot of forking and pull requests. I used Gitorious for some time (pretty much because of the same concerns), and it felt like a ghetto in comparison.

Berlios to shut down

Posted Oct 2, 2011 17:20 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

That's why I keep out of there. It's not a good idea to depend on a single (and proprietary) point of failure.

I generally host git trees on Gitorious. I also have my own simple git server, just in case.

Berlios to shut down

Posted Oct 2, 2011 17:24 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

And one important thing I forgot: big thanks to BerliOS for providing the service up until now.

Berlios to shut down

Posted Oct 1, 2011 6:10 UTC (Sat) by ay (guest, #79347) [Link]

Fair enough, though I suspect that most people want something that works reliably, has useful features, and is backed by a company that is invested in maintaining it and pays people to do that.

Berlios to shut down

Posted Oct 1, 2011 12:54 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Well, Gitorious is maintained by a company, pays people to do that, works reliably and has useful features.

Berlios to shut down

Posted Oct 1, 2011 8:25 UTC (Sat) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]

Ok, ok. Well, there's always repo.or.cz.

nongnu Savannah

Posted Oct 3, 2011 10:16 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

There is also GNU's Savannah, which offers a public service called nongnu. It is of course hosted using Free software, and provides an excellent service; there is a manual approval step though.

Disclaimer: I am a Savannah admin on sabbatical. Hey, that sounds cooler than I can possibly be.

Berlios to shut down

Posted Sep 30, 2011 18:34 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

I hope that someone is working to migrate the code to another repository. Has anyone heard of any such project?

Berlios to shut down

Posted Oct 1, 2011 21:19 UTC (Sat) by lolando (guest, #7139) [Link]

The ForgePlucker project was started about two years ago by one Eric S. Raymond; ESR promptly vanished from sight, but the project went on, since its goals overlapped some of the goals of the Coclico project which started exactly two years ago (and is just now ending). ForgePlucker was basically about webscraping content off forges, and the relevant part of Coclico was about dumping and reloading, based on a specified exchange format that was developed under the ForgePlucker umbrella.

The net result as of today is that there are tools to extract content off different forge or forge-alike softwares (eg. FusionForge or Trac) into one given format, and tools to inject the resulting dump into different forges or forge-alikes (eg. FusionForge or Trac). So what's required to migrate a project to a different forge is either scrape BerliOS and dump to the pivot format or convert the data exports that BerliOS provides into that format. The latter would probably be simpler, and it only needs to be written once (and probably only run once per project, too). Then just inject into the forge of your choice if it's FusionForge or Trac (or implement the injector if it's something else :-)

Relevant links: http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/weblog/2011/09... for a recent talk about that, http://www.coclico-project.org/index.php/Main_Page for the public website of Coclico, and http://forge.projet-coclico.org/ for the forge used by Coclico (the deliverables are somewhere in there, although it's currently a mess due to the project being nearing its final review). Also http://www.planetforge.org/ for a neutral ground for collaboration between forges.

(Disclaimer: I'm a FusionForge developer, and I worked in the Coclico project, although not on that particular part, so details may vary.)

Berlios to shut down

Posted Sep 30, 2011 18:50 UTC (Fri) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]

One must wonder whether the hack and defacement of the BerliOS site last year played some role in others revisiting its purpose and management. There was some controversy in the aftermath -- with evidence that other secret visitors had been marauding around the site for at least five years, there was no visible effort to check the integrity of files -- or even to alert users to the danger. At the time, the somewhat notorious Jörg Schilling, listed then as a "BerliOS employee", simply stated that no files had been manipulated, and concluded "Therefore, I currently don't see a reason to issue a warning."

I do note that Schilling does not appear as a current member of the "BerliOS Team".

BerliOS certainly has incubated several important projects and was one of the first "source portals" and will be remembered for that. But there are now no lack of similar facilities, so its loss will not be as damaging as it once might have been.

Berlios to shut down

Posted Sep 30, 2011 20:16 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

which brings the obvious conspiracy theory^W^W^Wquestion:
How is it related to the sun oracle acquisition ?

Berlios to shut down

Posted Oct 5, 2011 4:26 UTC (Wed) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

nicely done.

redirect to new site ?

Posted Oct 1, 2011 18:45 UTC (Sat) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link]

Does anyone know if Berlios plan to keep at least one redirection page for each project, let's say during one year ?

It would be nice for well known projects (lots of download) with low development activity (hint : check top 5 downloaded projects)