What do you think is the best way to open source an academic project?

kofi's picture
Submitted by kofi on Tue, 2009-12-01 19:33

One of the most popular ways to let the public get involved in the development of your project is to create a project on sourceforge.net. But why SourceForge? I'm hearing that SourceForge has become unpopular among 'serious' developers in recent years because of a heavy load of ads, poor performance, and slower adoption of new features than its competitors. Is there any truth to that?

I'm curious about what people in this community think, what are our best options as educoders?

Best Regards,
Dr. Baba Kofi Weusijana
Software Engineer & Researcher,
The Math Forum @ Drexel University
http://mathforum.org
A research and educational enterprise of
the Drexel School of Education
http://www.drexel.edu/soe/

http://www.linkedin.com/in/babakofi

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Comments

Jan's picture

Hi, I never used SourceForge

Submitted by Jan on Wed, 2009-12-09 19:33.

Hi,

I never used SourceForge as a platform for any project, but what do you think of GoogleCode? Or maybe Project Kenai?
We are using GoogleCode for the SCY project and it works pretty good for us.

Project Kenai might be interesting because of the good integration in netbeans all all the things that you get for free like BugTracking, different SCM/VC-systems.

Cheers,
Jan

matt.zukowski's picture

GitHub

Submitted by matt.zukowski on Fri, 2009-12-18 21:03.

SourceForge is floundering a bit lately. Google Code is great, but my favorite is GitHub. They really got things right in terms of integrating the social dimension into open source coding.

For example on GitHub anyone can fork your project and start adding their own changes/improvements/fixes with one click -- but the GitHub interface then makes it extremely easy for you to merge those changes back into your repository. This really makes the whole process of collaborating on code much easier -- both for you as a project admin and for others as contributors. And because all forks are equal peers, the process takes on a kind of evolutionary nature, where the best forks/branches survive and replicate. The advantage too is that if for some reason you, as the author/originator of a project drop off the face of the earth, your project easily lives on, not being reliant on your administration/control of it.