Comments on: Tidbits http://www.zenofnptech.org/2008/02/tidbits-2.html Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:36:02 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.1 By: Dustin J Mitchell http://www.zenofnptech.org/2008/02/tidbits-2.html#comment-5101 Dustin J Mitchell Thu, 14 Feb 2008 19:53:22 +0000 http://www.zenofnptech.org/2008/02/tidbits-2.html#comment-5101 SourceForge has been terrible since the beginning. I've never understood why they rolled their own everything -- forums, mailing list archives (at least they use Mailman for the list manager), bug tracking, etc. I guess that would be OK if they had done a great job with those things, but all of them are nearly impossible to use, especially when SF is having a "slow day" (which is most days). They just introduced a project wiki, but again, they've rolled their own and it's useless. Contrast that with Google Code's sweet Subversion-integrated wiki. The problem with Google Code is that it's *explicitly* for small projects. It's not intended to scale up to the proportions one would need for a major project like Python or Amanda. Also, to be fair, SourceForge supplies a lot more "raw resources" to its projects -- web space, databases, login servers, compile farms, and so on. Depending on the project, those can be really useful. SourceForge has been terrible since the beginning. I’ve never understood why they rolled their own everything — forums, mailing list archives (at least they use Mailman for the list manager), bug tracking, etc. I guess that would be OK if they had done a great job with those things, but all of them are nearly impossible to use, especially when SF is having a “slow day” (which is most days). They just introduced a project wiki, but again, they’ve rolled their own and it’s useless. Contrast that with Google Code’s sweet Subversion-integrated wiki.

The problem with Google Code is that it’s *explicitly* for small projects. It’s not intended to scale up to the proportions one would need for a major project like Python or Amanda. Also, to be fair, SourceForge supplies a lot more “raw resources” to its projects — web space, databases, login servers, compile farms, and so on. Depending on the project, those can be really useful.

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