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.
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).
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.
Re:Get ready Sourceforge (Score:3, Informative)
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).
Re:Get ready Sourceforge (Score:4, Informative)
Sourceforge alternative for the GNU-minded:
GNU Savannah
http://savannah.gnu.org/ [gnu.org]