Forge

Defense Department sets up its own SourceForge

The dam holding back U.S. federal adoption of open source just burst with the introduction of the Defense Department's Forge.mil.

Forge.mil is an open-source project repository built in the image of SourceForge.net, Federal Computer Week reported Friday.

Despite being based on SourceForge's technology, Forge.mil has one significant difference: security. As David Mihelcic, chief technology officer for the Defense Information Systems Agency, told Federal Computer Week, the Department of Defense's code repository has been "upgraded to meet DOD security requirements," with smart cards used to provide log-in credentials.

There are only … Read more

SourceForge turns to virtualization for hosted apps

SourceForge is trying to get development and collaboration tools in the hands of their users more quickly these days. They are announcing on Monday a new service for developers that provides fast, virtualized access to popular open-source apps. This is not a perfect solution, but a good quick way to answer some developer needs.

SourceForge isn't trying to reinvent the wheel. If there's an open-source tool out there that already works, it can now provide it easier to developers. That's smart. The first three being announced are LimeSurvey (survey app), MediaWiki, and phpBB (forum app). These were … Read more

Featured Freeware: CinemaForge

This combination video-conversion and creation tool boasts good speed and a nice set of features. CinemaForge's polished interface is both handsome and rather simple to understand, the Tom Cruise of software if he weren't into Scientology.

As a video converter, the application supports all expected formats. You also can choose to accompany any video with audio files of your choice rather than the original sound. When you click the digital-camera icon next to the File Input box, you'll be able to browse your computer for still images to compile a video file. If you choose to perform … Read more

The 404 156: Where we animate Scaley McGrabAss

Our guest today is Stone Newman from Go!Animate, enter The 404 animation contest, Spore porn, pay per sick note, GTA copycat killings, geeks as better lovers, and TV shows on the big screen.

Stone Newman drops by the studio today to tell us about an awesome Web site that allows you to create your own custom Flash animation without all the tech nonsense! Go!Animate is all about simplicity. You can choose from a variety of locations and a ton of different characters, or even upload a picture of your own! Very cool, I can't imagine how many … Read more

SourceForge Community Choice Awards nominations open

Nominations are officially opening for the 3rd annual Sourceforge.net Community Choice Awards. This year, for the first time, the awards will be open to ALL open source projects, not just those that count SourceForge.net as home.

There's the open nominations period, then voting on the finals, and it leads up to the awards party during OSCON at the Jupiter Hotel in downtown Portland on July 24th. Last year it was a pretty big deal, with over 500 people attending. In the past it's been a good awards ceremony, kind of wide open and fun, food and … Read more

SourceForge embraces OpenID

A great many open-source projects and companies have started on SourceForge.net. There's currently about 176,000 registered projects and 1.8 million registered users. Sure, not all of them are active or essential software, but if you want to build an open-source project, it can be a great place to get up and going. You may not go to SourceForge directly very often, but if you download open-source software, it's often sitting on SourceForge servers.

If there's been one knock against them, it's that their infrastructure is just average, not the latest-greatest. That may be … Read more

Slashdot parent company experiences overnight outage

UPDATE (6:04 a.m. PT): SourceForge's sites are back up. UPDATE (1:27 p.m. PT): Comment from SourceForge was added.

On Wednesday morning, there appeared to be some sort of outage at SourceForge Inc., parent company of iconic geek news forum Slashdot and retailer ThinkGeek (among others). Neither SourceForge nor the sites it operates were accessible at 5:30 a.m. PT. According to SourceForge, it was an emergency maintenance window that "caused an unanticipated network outage."

As they might have said at Slashdot rival Fark, "Everybody panic!"

Performance monitoring firm Pingdom reported that Slashdot was down … Read more

A Sourceforge for the Mac

You like open source, and you prefer the Mac. You're in luck! I stumbled across a great site today - MacForge - which hosts over 50,000 open-source applications written for the blessed operating system, Mac OS X.

MacForge is not nearly as feature-rich as Sourceforge is, but if you're looking for a great repository of Mac-based applications, MacForge is a useful destination.

SourceForge hacked, but not to worry(?)

Valleywag reports that SourceForge.net was hacked Wednesday, resulting in site downtime while SourceForge tracked down the hacker. SourceForge's Ross Turk confirms the report:

We played a game of cat and mouse with a "security enthusiast" from Europe yesterday. :) No harm done, though, and everything's running smoothly.

Given that projects upload their code to the SourceForge repository on a regular basis, there's not any serious cause for concern that a security breach would be a long-term threat. Additionally, it's doubtful that anyone would download and install any critically important software in the minutes or … Read more