BerliOS Software Repository Will Close At Year's End 62
An anonymous reader writes with some sad news from Germany, as posted on the BerliOS front page, and sent by email to developers as well. An excerpt: "As an European, non-proprietary project BerliOS pursued the goal to support the various open-source players and provide a neutral mediator function. In 2011 over 4710 projects have been hosted on BerliOS, with 50,000 registered users and over 2.6 million file downloads each month. We are proud that with BerliOS we have brought the idea of an OSS repository to Europe. Meanwhile, the concept has prevailed and there are many good alternatives. 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. ... As a developer, you should export your BerliOS project into another repository." BerliOS is slated to close on December 31st.
Sad... (Score:2, Funny)
BerliOS we Berli knew ye.
For the classical music fans of the world (Score:1)
It's been a fantastic symphony, but sure seems like whoever screwed up should be marched to the scaffold right now.
Get ready Sourceforge (Score:2)
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You mean "get ready Github ..."
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Several projects actually migrated from Sourceforge to BerliOS after Sourceforge was forced to make developers indicate whether their project might contain code not suitable for export to countries such as Iran according to US foreign policy rules (and developers moreover have to register with some US department if they indicate that their project does contain such code and want to have it hosted on Sourceforge).
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BIS license exception TSU (Score:2)
code not suitable for export to countries such as Iran according to US foreign policy rules
I don't think Britain falls under the description, "such as Iran". Any export is controlled by US foreign policy rules, silly.
I think "countries such as Iran" alluded to license exception TSU [doc.gov]. This exception applies to exports of publicly available cryptographic source code (or binaries built from such source code) and has two caveats. First, it applies only to countries other than Country Group E:1 (Cuba, Iran, DPRK, etc.), which could be construed as requiring IP address geolocation. Second, the publisher has to advertise each project to the U.S. government [doc.gov]. Some people may have objected to this notification requirement.
Re:Get ready Sourceforge (Score:4, Informative)
Sourceforge alternative for the GNU-minded:
GNU Savannah
http://savannah.gnu.org/ [gnu.org]
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Already on it (Score:4, Informative)
I started researching tools and writing scripts to split up a repository and move to github yesterday.
If you have a complicated non-standard svn layout, you should look into the svn2git on gitorious [gitorious.org] (there are many tools with that name).
Orphaned projects' code to perish? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Orphaned projects' code to perish? (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't have to sign your name, this is not an email, you know.
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I just checked archive.org and they currently haven't got any of the pages at the Berlios source code repositories indexed. So I don't think they consider it within their mission and I'm pretty sure they aren't going to do it. At least not if they don't get a nudge. But even if you contact them I think it'll be likely they'll say no, so if it is to be mirrored someone else will probably have to do it. (Personally, I don't have the resources I'm sad to say.)
Re:Orphaned projects' code to perish? (Score:2)
What's the main resource drain in such a project? Would deleting (or exporting) the 8000 or so orphaned projects have kept BerliOS afloat in the first place?
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What's the main resource drain in such a project? Would deleting (or exporting) the 8000 or so orphaned projects have kept BerliOS afloat in the first place?
Probably not - things like storage, web servers, etc. are pretty easy to maintain in a constant fashion. What scales is answering, "I can't get this to work," sorts of questions and those grow as a function of only the number of active projects.
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Wouldn't or a dead project be more likely to have issues leading to, I can't get this to work?
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Wouldn't or a dead project be more likely to have issues leading to, I can't get this to work?
I wasn't clear - the issues from the users of the berlios system (the developers who use it for hosting) not the users of the code/projects.
But you're right - I imagine the admins of any of these systems get inappropriate support requests from end users they have to spend time redirecting as well.
Re:Orphaned projects' code to perish? (Score:2)
Is there a berlios to github migration script?
I didn't even know they had financial difficulties (Score:4, Informative)
BerliOS definitely has publicity problems. Either that, or the people running it don't have much of a passion for keeping it running, because the first I heard about them having problems was about them deciding to shut it down.
Contrast that to, say, Wikipedia, Blender, or The Document Foundation. Major publicity when they needed money, with progress tallies and everything. Especially Wikipedia.
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Yeah, their fundraiser got so much publicity it became memetic.
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Damn, not only a grammar nazi, but someone that considers England to be in Europe! I thought that was a shooting offence here in the UK (or has the EU H&S statute outlawed that now?).
I introduce myself as British or, perhaps, English. To then lump me in as a European (ha, yes, you're correct, my natural instinct is to use "a", not "an") is likely to get you a very stern look, even if *technically* correct.
It's like calling a Mexican or Canadian "American". Technically correct (continent-wise), but th
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I have a Mexican friend. She will slap anyone who calls her American unless they go to the extreme length of qualifying it as being only the continent first. Even then, she gets pissed off. She's happy for you to call US people American, but because of vast misunderstanding in the common populace she doesn't want to be associated with the word "America" at all. If you ask her, she'll tell you she's Mexican, never American (or even North American). Even if you ask what continent she's on, she'll be like
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Sounds to me like you're describing some serious cultural anxiety there.
And you're deluding yourself about the difference between the UK and continental Europe. The UK isn't so different and the various countries in continental Western Europe aren't as similar as you seem to think. Having been in all of those places, the difference between Germany and the UK is smaller than, e.g., the difference between Germany and Italy or Spain. In either case, the similarities dominate. And the dissimilarities within the
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How strange. I typically introduce myself with my name.
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Oh wow, a little Englander on slashdot, I thought you'd all be at the Tory conference in Manchester.
I describe myself first as British, secondly as a (proud) European, and lastly and hardly ever as English, for all the negative connotations people like you have given it.
Britain is a European country, it has a proud history of involvement (for the better too) with the other countries in Europe, and it is a European culture.
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Britain is a European country, it has a proud history of involvement (for the better too) with the other countries in Europe and it is a European culture.
Just don't mention the war.
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I thought Fraunhofer was mostly sponsored by the MP3 playing crowds?
Who's heart's bleeding (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Who's heart's bleeding (Score:4, Funny)
Let's ogg them!
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Who's heart's bleeding? The Faunhofer Institute, isn't that the bunch of goons that burn government money and then want money for the stuff they come up with?
Applied research demands money and talent that does not come free.
You need a budget of about 1.65 billion euros each year to function at this level.
The Fraunhofer Society earns ca. 70% of its income through contracts with industry or specific government projects. The other 30% of the budget is sourced in the proportion 9:1 from federal and state (Land) government grants and is used to support preparatory research.
Thus the size of the society's budget depends largely on its success in maximizing revenue from commissions. This funding model applies not just to the central society itself but also to the individual institutes. This serves both to drive the realisation of the Fraunhofer Society's strategic direction of becoming a leader in applied research...
The Fraunhofer Society currently operates 60 institutes. The organisation has seven centers in the United States, under the name 'Fraunhofer USA', and three in Asia. In October 2010, Fraunhofer announced that it would open its first research center in South America.
These are Fraunhofer Institutes for:
Algorithms and Scientific Computing -- SCAI
Applied Information Technology -- FIT
Applied and Integrated Security -- AISEC
Applied Optics and Precision Engineering -- IOF
Applied Polymer Research --IAP
Applied Solid State Physics â" IAF
Biomedical Engineering -- IBMT
Building Physics -- IBP
Ceramic Technologies and Systems -- IK
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Who's heart's bleeding? The Faunhofer Institute, isn't that the bunch of goons that burn government money and then want money for the stuff they come up with?
Applied research demands money and talent that does not come free.
You need a budget of about 1.65 billion euros each year to function at this level.
The Fraunhofer Society earns ca. 70% of its income through contracts with industry or specific government projects. The other 30% of the budget is sourced in the proportion 9:1 from federal and state (Land) government grants and is used to support preparatory research.
Thus the size of the society's budget depends largely on its success in maximizing revenue from commissions.
I can read Wikipedia, thank you. My take is that the institute should cooperate more with the free software initiatives. Most likely they use free software to their advantage. It would have been just fair if they wouldn't have insisted on monetising their patents over the free community. I'm fine with paying for MP3 license through a Linux distro or device that makes money from me -i.E. Android, sat receiver, paid distro, distro charging me for support, etc... But the way Faunhofer behaved hurt the free sof
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All I know about the name "Fraunhofer" is that they are the assholes with the MP3 patents who tried to shut down all the open-source players and force the commercial ones to pay ransom. Learning that the "BerliOS" project is associated with them makes me less sympathetic, not more.
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Problem is, according to that homepage, it is expected to last even less than BerliOS: 40 days.
Archiving is a HUGE problem (Score:1)
I look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_software_hosting_facilities
and think, how can ANYONE get a handle on archiving this?
archive.org certainly isn't going to do this.
This is something the Open Source community is going to have to deal with. Just how, exactly do
you preserve something is big that is constantly changing? Archive off the static projects?
Projects should be archived (Score:2)
All the hosted projects should be archived. I was looking for an older uvcvideo driver source the other day and all the links Google pointed me to were dead BerliOS links. It was a very maddening experience.
I offer to host an archived version of BerliOS over a dedicated 35Mbps (symmetric) connection and have systems and TBs of hard drive space to spare. Please get in touch with me if you think this will help. Whatever you do, don't kill the whole thing. Not all projects will get exported before the clo
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