- SourceForge.net: An Open Source Incubator

Spend any time looking for free software and you're sure to run into SourceForge.net, a site operated by VA Software's Open Source Technology Group (OSTG), which also runs Slashdot, ThinkGeek, and Linux.com. SourceForge supports the development of more than 137,000 open-source software projects—in categories as diverse as games, enterprise, multimedia, and system administration—and makes them available for free download, adding more than 100 per day. "We approve all projects before they're created," says Ross Turk, SourceForge's director of engineering. "We make sure they're legitimate projects, licensed under an OSI license. Only a very small percentage are rejected. We don't exert a lot of control over the projects, but they use our tools."

Project support SourceForge provides free Web space for the projects, as well as source code management software and other ­development tools, mailing lists and forums, and a centralized tracker for managing defects. The site's statistics and rankings, coupled with SourceForge's reputation, help give the projects visibility. The average project has two or three developers, but others have dozens of people working on them. Many of the programs that we feature in this article (Audacity, FileZilla, and Gaim, to name a few) were incubated at SourceForge.

Navigating SourceForge.net Finding one's way around SourceForge.net used to be close to impossible for a newbie, but thanks to some new tools, it's much easier now. When you click on any category on the home page (www.sourceforge.net), you see not only capsule descriptions of software projects ordered by rank, but also a menu showing all the topics and several levels of subtopics. (Rank is determined by recent activity and interest. You can also sort the results by other fields such as the number of downloads, the registration date, the OS, and the license.)

You can search for keywords within a project, and an Advanced Search feature lets you find projects by category, submission date, and other descriptors. The streamlined site also makes downloading easier. You no longer have to select a mirror site because the system automatically chooses the one it deems optimal.