Berlios closing down

http://developer.berlios.de/forum/forum.php?forum_id=37450

by ethereal • 15 years ago

93 24 15 years ago

developer.berlios.de

macavity23• 15 years ago

It's a shame, because they had a great service, but it's very hard for them to generate buzz nowadays as they have been very much overshadowed by github.

skeptical2• 15 years ago

You nailed by using the word 'buzz', it's pretty much about the buzz. It's a shame things turn out this way.

jsavimbi2• 15 years ago

It's not about the buzz. It's about addressing the needs of the users, all of the users, and building an ecosystem that provides them with the necessary tools to discover, learn, participate and improve. That and building up brand loyalty through meatspace efforts.

One cannot make the case for a model that has converted 50,000 over an eleven year span in comparison with another who has surpassed 1,000,000 users in a relatively short span. Common sense.

mhd4• 15 years ago

By github? Berlios was overshadowed by savannah.gnu.org and sourceforge. If you're talking about github or even Google Code, it's not just buzz…

streptomycin• 15 years ago

berlios actually overshadowed sourceforge for a while, back when sourceforge was stuck with CVS as the only option for an ungodly long period of time.

stfu• 15 years ago

"It hurts us all the more that we are forced to discontinue the hosting for BerliOS by 31.12.2011." Is hosting for something like that really so much of an issue? I would have expected Frauenhofer to have plenty of serverspace around to keep it up for a little longer.

ramereth• 15 years ago

Its probably a situation where their contract with the facility/server space runs out on that date.

simonbrown• 15 years ago

Or strike a deal with GitHub or SourceForge to transfer the projects to them (although that would only cover Developer and DocsWell).

mhd4• 15 years ago

Does that mean that a whole bunch of unmaintained projects are vanishing into limbo?

aninteger• 15 years ago

Probably. Sounds like a job for Jason Scott and the Archive Team.

coderdude• 15 years ago

It's on their deathwatch: http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Deathwatch

Hopefully they have a chance to mirror it all.

_ak2• 15 years ago

You say that as if it were a bad thing.

mhd4• 15 years ago

Call me Cassandra, but I bet in 2013, while sitting in front of a Linux box I'll wonder whether there isn't an utility that does all that I need from GnomeFooBarBarella without 2.7 gigs of dependencies, and then the link to it goes to berlios…

profquail• 15 years ago

Well, it might be cheaper to create a read-only mirror of all of the projects on BerliOS and host it for free for a while than to have to re-create some obscure bit of software you need for an old system (or to recover data from an old disk, etc.)

_ak2• 15 years ago

The question is: is Jörg Schilling (who maintained BerliOS) now unemployed because FOKUS decided to close BerliOS, or do they close it down because Jörg Schilling left FOKUS and nobody's interested in maintaining the mess he left behind? (j/k)

0x12• 15 years ago

Do you always joke at funerals?

gjmveloso• 15 years ago

Nowdays, open source repos providers should be a mix of community engagement initiative and real business. Like GitHub and BitBucket.

wazoox• 15 years ago

Isn't a couple of servers enough to host such a service? This is the matter of 80€/month... (at least this is what I'm paying right now for 2 i5 servers with 1Gb/s unlimited traffic and 1TB mirrored drives).

rb2k_• 15 years ago

Yes, but it's the Fraunhofer Society... I worked there for a little bit and you really notice that it's partially state owned and usually full of people trying to get their PhD and then leave. That also means that they get funding for writing papers, not for actually maintaining something.

That also might be why they have the weird chart on the frontpage (http://i.imgur.com/TTSFn.png), it's probably straight out of some report :-/

I guess my 'rant' kind of shows how annoying I think this kind of institution is when it comes to dealing with something as quickly moving and interesting as the internet. Although they employ a lot of people and have a large sum of money, they don't seem to be able to create any of the cool things people actually use or really innovate. The main focus is usually on something that they're able to sell to somebody managing somewhere at the State. Something like "we're developing the next b2b exchange format for selling services in the cloud." This usually means writing a lot of papers and reports and projects, looking for somebody big in the industry to 'work with' and then releasing a somewhat crappy demo implementation of it that then dies after the last paper has been written.

Sorry about the rant, I somehow get annoyed when I see that much time and money being wasted. I'm sure they do some cool stuff, but the majority of it just seems like a fire to throw money into.

Berlios closing down

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