Publishing Open Source Projects
I've collaborated or contributed to a few community projects over the year (most notably Nant a few years back). I haven't been active in any big projects recently, with the most recent contribution being the WCF support in QuickCounters, but I've posted a number of useful libraries and utilities over the last couple of years, several of which have been used by other people.
I originally posted many of these as just samples (source included), but if people find them useful, I wonder if it would be interesting to turn them into more proper open source projects. I'm talking about things like: the PipelineTesting library, the several pipeline components, my MSMQ activities for WF and a few things here and there for WCF and such. Would people find them useful? Would anyone care to contribute to them if they were used to start a few proper open source projects?
Assumming there is enough interest (I'm guessing not, but you never know), what's the best place to publish them? Right now, I see three basic choices:
- SourceForge: This is the classic option, and SF is fairly robust and offers good facilities. I don't like a lot of the SF infrastructure, though, and there's so much stuff there anyway that finding anything can be painful.
- CodePlex: This would be a logical choice for open source projects in the MS world and it's what we're using for QuickCounters. The site seems robust and useful, and the backend is pretty robust (based on Team Foundation Server after all).
However, the dependency on TFS is what I consider it's weakest point as well: No anonymous access to the source control repository, and when developing on it you have to put up with the TFS client which is big, slow and somewhat cumbersome. Plus, being based on TFS it doesn't really support disconnected development, which I consider one of the worst "features" of TFS. - Google Code: I noticed Scott Bellware has been using Google Code to host his NUnit-Spec stuff, and took a look at the project hosting support there.
The site seems nice. As much of the Google stuff, the interface is pretty simple and covering the basics. Source Control is based on SVN, which I rather like overall (and which offers full disconnected development support, unlike CodePlex).
One big downside I noticed to Google Code is that the only way to find stuff there seems to be through searching, which makes it very hard to do something I do all the time in both SF and CodePlex: browse around looking for interesting projects. I've found quite a number of pearls that way and I think it's important.
Any opinions? comments? preferences? I'd love to hear what people have to say on this topic!
Actually, you can browse pretty effectively using the project labels. Right on the front page are some to get you started:
http://code.google.com/hosting/
Hit one of those, and you get a list of projects. Drill in on any project, or maybe hit one of the labels that the projects have associated with themselves to get another slice of projects.
In the future, we may surface this a bit more, and provide information on tag popularity and things like that, but what we have today should work very well for random browsing.
Cheers,
-g
Greg: I may have been a bit confused by the fact that the page explicitly says only "example project labels" are listed; which to me says they are not comprehensive (and thus allow you only to browse a small subset of the projects hosted). Is this the wrong interpretation then?
Hi Tomas:
I must said first that I LOVE Source Forge !!
I must admit also, that at first I was fighting with the Linux shell and SSH but I learn a lot of things after.
Here is a list of what I think that are + and – of SF.NET
+ Near every body knows the sf.net pages or download pages (a lot of people download NUnit, NAnt, TortoiseSVN, etc)
+ They provide a full controled project quote of 100MB so you can install there a wike a blog anything.
+ They have a perfect mirroring File Download System
+ Is a well designed robust site
+ VA Software is putting a lot of money and hiring a lot of people to enhace their pages and systems
+ Sf.Net have a donation system
+ Sf.Net is working in some ideas to help open source developers to make a bit of money from their work (and M$ is in the opositive direction)
+ a personal opinion.. I love SVN and hate VSS and all the later Source Control Tech from M$ so I hate Team Server (is expensive and we love some other OSS alternatives) I think that a lot of people cant help you based on that point ( I´m the first )
+ Provide VHOST http://www.filehelpers.com
+ Is the alma mother of Open Source and I´m 100% with them (A lot of people in the OSS don’t like the idea of google providing project hosting, but, the competition is always good, after the release of Google Code, SF.NET was enhacing a lot their site, and thats good !!)
+ Granular Security Settings
+ Good Statistics about the project activity
+ The mirror selector (one of the bad things of the old SF) is completely simple and efficient.
+ and the list go on…
- not so good item traking but you can pay an external Trac hosting http://trac.edgewall.org/
- Only Linux Hosting
- Has too much things so is a bit confussing for newbies
If your choise is sf.net I can make you setting up the proyects
Saludos
Marcos