Site Application Version: 1.0.5
Status: Not Logged In [Login] | [New User]
[Software Map] [New Releases] [Site Docs] [Top Projects]
| ★ wanayoo — archive 1999 http://sourceforge.net/docs/site/faq.php | Nouvelle recherche | Portail wanayoo |
| linux.com partner |
|
|
Site Application Version: 1.0.5 Status: Not Logged In [Login] | [New User] [Software Map] [New Releases] [Site Docs] [Top Projects]
|
| |
|
 |
SourceForge Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
SourceForge is a free hosting service for Open Source developers which offers, among other things, a CVS repository, mailing lists, bug tracking, message forums, task management software, web site hosting, permanent file archival, full backups, and total web-based administration. A more complete description of services is available. In short, Open Source software is software with source code made available to the public, with no fees or royalties for use or distribution. The official definition, as well as the rationale and history behind open source software, can be found at The Open Source Initiative's web site. In the near future we will have an Open Source FAQ, with discussion about the legalities of Open Source software, business justification, and market trends. The SourceForge admin staff, Tony, Drew, Tim, and Uriah, developed most of what you see on SourceForge now. We of course owe a lot of credit to the software that made our work a lot easier, and to the people and organizations that donated time and hardware to make SourceForge possible. SourceForge started out as a small idea that just refused to stop growing. Many people have been incredibly helpful along the way. We would like to thank the entire open source community for the support that they are known for. Why did you create SourceForge? Strangely, a system this big wasn't our original intention. We really had no idea that there would be such a reception for this kind of innovation in hosting open source software. As open source developers ourselves, we have run into the kinds of obstacles that still plague many would-be developers. It was our intent to remove many of those obstacles and let developers focus on software development. (An odd concept, but easier to get used to than you'd think.) A suite of tools isn't enough, though. In the end, you need the hardware power for the whole setup, which might lead to your next question: VA Linux Systems has supported this project from the beginning. Some of us were employed by VA before the conception of SourceForge (although none had ever worked in the same department), others were hired specifically for this project. The hardware behind this site is truly impressive, and has proven to us VA's dedication to this project and to Open Source development. What is the motivation to pay for something like this? Stop looking for ulterior motives or fantasies about world domination. There are some good business reasons why a Linux company would benefit from a site such as this. VA Linux Systems thrives upon the success of Open Source software in general. They sell Linux systems, installed with a myriad of Open Source tools and applications, to clients that require enterprise-ready components and software. They also sell support for these systems. If the selection and quality of Open Source software improves, VA can offer its customers more competitive solutions. On a more personal note, VA is not a behemoth with no sense of the community which made it grow. I joined VA because they would allow me to continue to spend significant amounts of my time in Open Source development. They have never taken that freedom from me, and in fact have encouraged employees to take part in community endeavors. This site is the real thing. -drew This seems like an awful lot of free stuff. What's the catch? There's no catch. I'm an Open Source developer. I work on a project to aid other Open Source developers. So do many other developers. An Open Source friendly company pays for it, and we thank them a lot. Do you always ask this many questions? That's cool! I'd really like to help. Can I? Of course. We're working on a lot of ways that we can utilize the help of the rest of the community. As soon as we can clean up some of this code and package it in some recognizable format, we'll be releasing many of the SourceForge web-based tools as Open Source projects in SourceForge. (That still confuses me, but somehow the logic works.) This means that we can take on developers on these projects, and as the tools improve, the new versions will automatically be available to other SourceForge project developers. There will also be a place for other users of SourceForge to help. We expect to eventually have some sort of news system that will require maintenance, we could definitely use help answering emails, and we could always use help with site design. (Don't laugh. We're software developers, not artists.) Everyone can help by answering the site surveys that we will occasionally post. Answers to these questions will directly influence the direction of our development. Who can host with SourceForge? We're trying to keep it simple, and chose to rely on the work of a very talented group, the Open Source Initiative. If your software utilizes one of the OSI's approved licenses, we'd love to offer you hosting at SourceForge. Software that falls under other licenses will require further scrutiny, but is not altogether ruled out. In the end, we're looking to further Open Source software development, and will approve projects accordingly. What if I don't have software, but wanted you to host my web site? If you're site is oriented towards the Open Source community, we'd probably be happy to offer you hosting. Please be careful with this one, though. We're not here to host personal homepages, or your Southpark picture archive (despite how much we all love Southpark). There are plenty of free site hosting services for these sites. Our goal is the advancement of Open Source, and if your web site does that, we'd love to have you. Are there any restrictions on the types of software I can host here? For legal reasons, we can't host strong-encryption products with code that originated outside of the US. We're working on a system to allow the hosting US-originated strong-encryption, with restricted access to downloads. We are also not set up with the right age-checking mechanisms to host material/software of a pornographic nature. (As nice as a local connection to your porn archive might be to us, we just can't do it.) There is a more complete definition of these restrictions in the terms of service agreement, presented during project registration. Cut us some slack on this one. We're trying to keep ourselves and the company that provided all of this hardware and bandwidth out of trouble. We're not here to start a political discussion. Can I host commercial software on SourceForge? Maybe. If your commercially developed software is Open Source, then yes. If your commercially developed software is not yet Open Source, but will be later, then probably yes. If your commercially developed software is not Open Source, but may help to advance other Open Source software, then maybe. If you just like our tools so much that you want to use them, then go ahead. We'll be releasing many of them as Open Source soon. If this prospect overwhelms you, then contact VA Linux Professional Services, they'll be glad to help you. (Shameless plug for our sponsors.) Who owns the source code on SourceForge? The individual authors hold the copyright on their own software. Because of the nature of Open Source licenses, we are allowed to give people access to that software; however, all license disputes and issues are the responsibilities of the individual authors. There is often a misconception that Open Source software does not actually have a license holder, because of its free nature. This is not the case, however, and software hosted on SourceForge is responsible for its own licensing. What if I host with SourceForge, then decide to stop? We would of course like to solve any problems you were having before it came to this, but in the end, you are free to leave at anytime. After all, we're not the copyright holders. Because your software was/is Open Source, however, we will probably still have the right to continue to make existing versions of your software available to the public. If we didn't, someone else probably would anyway. We're happy people here. Can't we all just Open Source and be happy together? Why should I host my software with SourceForge? ...mumble...free...mumble...gift horse.... But seriously, we're not trying to force anything on anybody here. We would love people to host with SourceForge because we are a superior hosting service. In the spirit of Open Source, we want any popularity we gain to be merit-based. As we grow, we will also be able to provide you with traffic to your project. There is a lot of benefit to giving end-users a window into your development environment. There will be more peer review of your source, and potential developers will be wandering by. Yes, we have taken extreme caution in the methods we use for SourceForge services. No system is uncrackable, but we continuously monitor the software we use for bugs and security holes, and audit our own software regularly. Encryption is available and enforced on all parts of the SourceForge site except mailing lists. (These passwords should be different than your site passwords. We are in the process of modifying GNU Mailman to use our own secure authentication system.) We give SSH accounts rather than telnet, SCP rather than ftp, and CVS/SSH instead of pserver. Site logins are via SSL and site passwords are never stored nor communicated in plaintext. Because it is possible to change your site password by confirming your email address (via a partial MD5 hash sent to your registered address), we recommend that you also keep your own mail account secure. We perform a full backup of all site and project data daily, and rotate backups off-site weekly through a large company that specializes in storing backup tapes. We also have access to a fireproof safe for storage of daily tapes. The exception to this rotation is the mega-file-server, which cannot be fully backed up (when full) by less than 34 25GB AIT tapes (our medium of choice). It gets a full backup once per month and incrementals otherwise. Do I have to use all of your services? Can I just use mailing lists, or bug tracking? You can use whatever you want. If you don't need all of the services now, don't use them. They are there when you need them. Won't I lose a lot of control if I don't have root access? Yes and no. The tradeoff is the security and stability of a professionally managed server. Once initial setup is through, there really isn't much need for root access except for security and maintenance upgrades, which we are taking care of. We would like to implement all other functions for which you would normally require root access via a web interface. Obviously we can't give root access to everyone, or your own security is at the disposal of any other project admin. We're trying to find a happy medium. In general we'll try to give as much access as we can without damaging the security of other projects within SourceForge. In the end, we're here to serve you. VA Linux Systems now pays our salary to offer you these services. We're a pretty responsive bunch. We'd like to work through any issues you have, just let us know what we need to do. We hope that you'll find our web administration tools powerful and easy to use. We're constantly continuing to develop and improve these tools. If there is some feature we can add that you think we've forgotten, please let us know. I already have a cvs tree. Can you import it? Yes. Register a new project normally and let us know you need to import a CVS tree. We'll need a tar/gzip of your entire document root, including CVSROOT directory. This will preserve your revision history. I have a lot of file releases already. Can I make them available on the main file server? Yes, when releasing new files via the project admin interface, there is an option to set the release date of each file. You may back-populate your release history in this manner. That way all previous revisions of your software are available on the main file server. So how big is all this, really? We are all of course biased, but it is this writer's opinion that this is one of the best opportunities for Open Source developers in history. Isn't Open Source a fad? Can it really work? Ack! This site's developers and the company behind it believe deeply in the concepts of Open Source software. Open Source is not a fad. Open Source can and does work. This site is proof of that. We would not have been able to offer many of our functions without modifications to many programs we use. Their open source let us make these modifications (which were sent back to the original authors for inclusion in the next versions of their software). <RANT>I can't believe that after BIND, Apache, Samba, PERL, Linux, and the GNU toolset, you can still ask that question.</RANT> How much capacity does SourceForge have right now? A quick look at our hardware list will partially answer that question. We've performed many real-world benchmarks of the various parts of our systems. We are capable of handling many projects now, and will scale our systems to meet demand. Nobody likes a slow server, especially us. If you want some quick stats on our current systems, here you go:
Wow. That's a lot. Can it scale? Yes, and don't threaten us or we'll do it. Are you going to mirror SourceForge? (and can I pay for it?) We will probably be mirroring the main file server sometime in the near future. The real problem is the databases behind the main website and synchronization of all the other servers in real-time. For now, we're content to have good backups, and spare hardware to put in place if something should fail. We do take reliability seriously, and a non-west-coast mirror does seem like a good idea. In lieu of a realtime mirror, we're considering setting up a failover mirror that would lag a few minutes behind the live site. We're pursuing our options here and will keep you posted. As for the second question... VA's CFO says, yes, you may pay for it. I thought Linux wasn't ready for the enterprise. What was your setup experience like? We're working on a paper detailing our experience setting up this system. We expect to publish it soon. For those of you that can't wait, it can be summarized, "Yay Open Source." What improvements in Linux/Open Source software are you still waiting for? We're especially anxious to see shared disk arrays over fibre channel, a journalled file system (although we're looking at promising ones now), 32-bit UIDs (should be fixed with the new file system), better scheduling (apparent in the development Linux kernels), and support for my Philips PC Camera. What is the future of SourceForge? It is looking good, my friend. VA is committed, we're committed, and we've already got ideas that will continue to drive us for months. The rest is up to you. Help us to help you, and we can all help to advance Open Source to new heights. Who wrote this FAQ? Are you available? This FAQ was written by Drew Streib (dtype), although I'm sure it will be modified by many people in the future, especially after they see what I've written. Yes.
|
|