SourceForge.net director says Geocrawler and SourceForge.net are healthy

The SourceForge.net email archives at Geocrawler.com are not going away, as some users fear. Instead, they’re just moving — to SourceForge itself.

A message on Geocrawler last week, saying the site was no longer being maintained (since taken down), caused some nervousness among SourceForge users. In particular, Advogato.org posted a story worrying about alternatives to SourceForge should it fall victim of bad economic times. Advogato’s evidence of problems at SourceForge: The Geocrawler list, a “core service” of SourceForge, was no longer being maintained. (NewsForge, SourceForge and Geocrawler are all owned by VA Linux.)

The author of the Advogato piece suggested that Open Source project leaders should explore alternatives to SourceForge: “SourceForge has been an incredibly valuable resource over its lifetime. It would be quite a shame to see it go, and this cat sincerely hopes they find a way to stay afloat in these turbulent seas. That said, it’s never a good idea to be vulnerable to the failure of one server, or one company. It’s also not the free
software way. The need to keep good backups is as strong as it ever was.”

It turns out that Geocrawler was simply the victim of bad wording on that message. Patrick McGovern, site director of SourceForge.net, says those SourceForge email archives are moving to SourceForge, to make it easier for users to find them. The move should be complete in about a week.

The SourceForge team is still evaluating what to do with the rest of the email archives at Geocrawler, McGovern says. Right now, those lists continue to be updated.

McGovern also posted a comment on Advogato about the concerns over SourceForge’s future and corporate parent VA Linux’s future. “SourceForge.net is not going away,” he wrote. “VA is not going away. The company, as well as the technology sector, is having a hard time right now, but the company has the money and resources to be around for the long haul.”

McGovern noted, both on Advogato and in an interview, that SourceForge continues to grow. The number of registered users should hit 300,000 by SourceForge’s second anniversary Nov. 17; that’s up from 50,000 users on its first anniversary.

“The site is getting additional resources (not less) to be successful,” he wrote on Advogato. “We recently added 70 servers. We’ve added systems to the compile farm. We are adding to the number of download servers. We are hiring. I need talented folks to work on the site. If you are a skilled DBA send me your resume.”