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Software EU Open Source

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.
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BerliOS Software Repository Will Close At Year's End

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  • Sad... (Score:2, Funny)

    by neokushan ( 932374 )

    BerliOS we Berli knew ye.

  • I know the SF overlords are listening. I bet a lot of people will want to migrate their projects from berlios to another site...
  • Already on it (Score:4, Informative)

    by AI0867 ( 868277 ) on Monday October 03, 2011 @04:21AM (#37587990)

    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).

  • by zapyon ( 575974 ) on Monday October 03, 2011 @04:29AM (#37588006)
    Hi. As someone else mentioned in some German forum, it is probable that all orphaned projects on BerliOS will perish the day BerliOS is taken down for good. - Anyone here who could offer a full mirror of the data. Or would Archive.org be an option? zapyon
    • by Anonymous Coward

      You don't have to sign your name, this is not an email, you know.

    • 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?

      • 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.

        • by AvitarX ( 172628 )

          Wouldn't or a dead project be more likely to have issues leading to, I can't get this to work?

          • 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.

    • Is there a berlios to github migration script?

  • by RR ( 64484 ) on Monday October 03, 2011 @04:40AM (#37588026)

    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.

  • 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? A sense of warmth is not what comes up immediately whenever the name is mentioned.
    • by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Monday October 03, 2011 @07:27AM (#37588556)

      Let's ogg them!

    • 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

      • 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

    • 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.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    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?

  • 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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