The Massachusetts-based Open Source Development Network, a division of VA Linux Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:LNUX), Thursday (Jan 4) announced that SourceForge.net, the world’s largest ASP for Open Source developers, now supports over 100,000 registered users. Since its official launch exactly one year ago, SourceForge.net has expanded its base of supported projects to more than 13,000, including major projects such as MySQL, Tcl, Python, XFree86, KDE and Squid.
To accommodate the rapid expansion of SourceForge.net, OSDN has added significant resources to the site, including additional personnel, bandwidth and VA Linux servers and storage systems. SourceForge.net’s user base has grown at an average rate of more than 30 percent per month.
Further, SourceForge.net has entered into a collaborative agreement with University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill’s online library, ibiblio, which will serve as a mirror and partial ftp site for SourceForge.net. With its roots in the former SunSITE and MetaLab, ibiblio.org has historically played a key role in helping to expand and improve the archiving of information on the Internet, with a significant library of Linux and Open Source software.
“The rapid growth of SourceForge.net during its first year of service demonstrates the growing popularity of the Open Source development model across a wide range of platforms, as well as the popularity of the SourceForge toolset,” said John “Tiberius” Hall, vice president of strategic planning, VA Linux Systems. “By working with ibiblio, we hope to further improve SourceForge.net’s ability to catalog, archive and distribute Open Source software and documentation.”
“The compatibility of the goals and key directions of SourceForge.net and ibiblio, as well as complementary research and service interests, make this relationship a great boost for the Open Source Community,” said ibiblio.org director Paul Jones. “Our relationship with SourceForge.net will help us bring the state of contributor-run archives and libraries to a high level very quickly. There are no limits in sight.”
ibiblio.org is home to one of the largest “collections of collections” on the Internet. ibiblio is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics and cultural studies. ibiblio.org is a collaboration of the Center for the Public Domain, a non-profit foundation, and the University of North Carolina — Chapel Hill with institutional support from the School of Information and Library Science, the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology.
Founded in 1992 as SunSITE and known more recently as MetaLab, ibiblio.org was one of the first sites on the web. ibiblio.org is the home of the Linux Documentation Project as well as a variety of other information sharing projects.
