Open source project hosting has long been a topic that interests me. I stopped recommending venerable SourceForge.net some years ago, as it’s proprietary stack (open source prior to 2001) became crufty and fell behind some of the newer and more agile offerings.

Well, I think it’s time to revisit.

I received an email on Tuesday from the “SourceForge.net Team” with the geeky and lame title of “SourceForge.net feature deprecation upcoming: forums, DocManager, TaskManager, Diary/Notes”. Deprecated should be deprecated from email subject lines, as should negative sounding email subjects.

The meat of the email is the second half (emphasis mine):

…

We will provide an easy-to-use migration path to move the data to the provided replacements.  We will also provide dumps of this data in case
projects want to do something different with their data.  Additional information on how to obtain or migrate your data will be provided when the
timeline is announced, in a future mailing.

The following applications are due to be deprecated, replaced by high-quality Open Source applications we have in our Hosted Apps offering:

* TaskManager will be replaced by TaskFreak!, dotProject and Trac
(tickets).
* DocManager will be replaced by MediaWiki and Trac (wiki).
* Discussion Forums will be replaced by phpBB.
* Diary and Notes will be replaced by WordPress.

To solicit your feedback on how the migration should be handled, and alternate options you would like us to consider, we are running a survey
for the next 30 days for the user base of each of these applications.  For links to the surveys, please see our Site Status post at:

http://tinyurl.com/q3g8o3

Trac and WordPress (really!) are two of my favorite open source web applications. And all of the applications in that list are highly regarded.

It’s fantastic to see SourceForge getting back to open source — ironic, no. It will be interesting to see how active they are in particulating in those projects. I dont’ think I’ve seen any SorceForge team members participating recently on WordPress’s Bug Tracker (Trac).

It’s also fantastic to see SourceForge engaging their community by posting this on a WordPress powered blog and also using surveys to solicite feedback about the migrations and the tool choices.

I would love to find out how long this change has been in the works and what people made it happen.

I also notice that SourceForge’s own documentation is now in a trac wiki. Wow, as well as Subversion, you can also use either Mercurial or Git.

The SourceForge team has done an incredible amount for open source, and I’m excited to reconsider using SourceForge.net again to future projects.