Sourceforge.net announced several updates that have taken place to the open source project collaboration site, including an upgrade to its search capability.
A decade ago, the disclosure that Microsoft was preparing to enter a technology market would begin stirring fear in that marketplace. Existing vendors heard their beating hearts being slowly silenced by Microsoft.
Google could be ready to take that mantle from Microsoft. It appears The Fear has slipped into the corporate apparatus at SourceForge, as the company sent along a belated press release to our inbox about their recent site updates.
Friday readers will recall that Google launched Project Hosting, a pared down version of SourceForge, essentially. As we noted here:
Google is taking care not to overtly stomp on SourceForge with Project Hosting, which will not have some features that are present at SourceForge and similar sites.
That’s a careful statement, in that Google doesn’t say whether or not it finds those particular features desirable. Stein goes on to tell Brockmeier that Google was able to “cut out a lot of heavy structure” in creating Project Hosting.
SourceForge’s structure has its fans and its detractors. To win over the latter and keep the former, SourceForge’s masters at OSTG have proceeded to make several changes to the site.
They listed the search redesign at the top of the list. “By implementing enhanced sorting and filtering options, and introducing new advanced project and tool searches, visitors can quickly drill in to the site’s vast content,” they noted in an email.
“SourceForge.net now offers the community robust and powerful search capabilities and a better way to browse our content. Judging from the increased usage of these offerings, the community is embracing these tools to find best-of-breed Open Source solutions,” said Jay Seirmarco, general manager of SourceForge.net.
Google made Subversion its version control mechanism of choice at the outset. SourceForge added Subversion in February, in addition to the older CVS it has had in place for some time.
SourceForge also tweaked Subversion so projects could be linked to external Subversion repositories. They plan to extend that new linking capability so projects can offer users access to other services or tools, like developer blogs and documentation wikis.
More improvements to SourceForge are at hand, as the site plans to build on its lengthy reputation and hosting of more than 125,000 projects. They want the next 125,000 projects to come there too, and not head over to Google Code’s alternative.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
