Google open source
Google has opened code.google.com, a site for external developers interested in Google-related development. Released so far are four developer-related libraries; results from "20 percent time" projects. (Google requires its engineers to spend one day a week on technology projects they personally find interesting but are unrelated to their regular work.)
Of particular interest to me is Google perftools, which is similar to a concurrent memory allocation project I've been working on. The other projects are a library for creating core dumps of running Linux programs (looks like it might be useful), an efficient C++ hash_map implementation, and a Python library supporting functional-style programming.
The source code is released under the new BSD license (great choice) and hosted on SourceForge. I'm somewhat concerned that SourceForge is becoming the central repository for so much of open source. It's a single point of failure. While no (or at least very little) code exists exclusively there, a lot of open source projects would become unavailable if SourceForge as we know it today were to disappear. A bit more diversity would be good for reliability.
18 March, 2005
Adding insult to injury
Feedback
by mamelouk
Yeap, agree with Tom, and the files are on lot of mirrors, so if sourceforge diseappear, I will be easy for each project to rebuild theirs web pages and cvs repository elsewhere.
And IMO where is no reason for sourceforge to diseappear.
Feedback is closed for this entry.
by Tom
What you say about SourceForge is true, but it's also true that having all of those projects in a central location makes finding and retrieving them a much more standardized procedure. I, as well as many people, could probably download a project from SF in my sleep. :)