# FOSS hosting facility suggestions



## carlton_draught (Dec 6, 2010)

Hi,

I'm about to release my first Free and Open Source Software package under the BSD license, and I was wondering which hosting facilities people have gone with/would go with and why. I was originally thinking of going with sourceforge, but I read the TAC of the site and was not sure what their perpetual license meant. So I started looking at alternatives. The ones that google suggests via autocomplete when you type in "sourceforge vs " are:

sourceforge
github
bitbucket
google code
codeplex (not using it out of principle, it's Microsoft)
gitorious
assembla

I guess self-hosting is a possibility too, though that seems like useless reinventing of the wheel.

I have written the code for (Open)Solaris compatibility, so bear in mind that it's not just FreeBSD users who may be using it.

I realize that wikipedia has a comparison page, but I'm curious as to get some opinion from people here before I decide which to choose. Thoughts? Feel free to suggest any not listed.


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## graudeejs (Dec 7, 2010)

I'd say go with Google code or gitorious... I've used bough both but in the end I started to do selfhosting 

Or, if you like, I can host it for you at http://git.bsdroot.lv or http://hg.bsdroot.lv (preferred)
In any case push/pull/clone over ssh and clone/pull over http

Gitorious and Google code is good (compared to my offer) because you have wiki, issue tracking, and easy account management 
I only plan to add trac at summer, when I will be free of University 

(I care little about license... and at this time I can even offer primitive private repos)


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## carlton_draught (Dec 7, 2010)

killasmurf86 said:
			
		

> I'd say go with Google code or gitorious... I've used bough both but in the end I started to do selfhosting


Thanks for your offer, killasmurf86. I want to go with something a bit more mainstream though.

I've now done a fair bit of googling now about the various options. At first, github seemed to be the best option. It is growing exponentially if you look at google trends versus any other option. It seems to have a lot of buzz associated with it. I often further investigate things that are growing at a rapid rate because often they have a killer feature I'm not aware of at first. AFAICT, the popularity of github seems to stem from the "social network" aspect of github, and the ease of forking stuff. It gets compared to facebook.

I am not a fan of facebook, so that's not a selling point. I also prefer Google's Terms and Conditions, they seem less onerous and more mellow. The only VCS I have familiarity with is SVN, so Mercurial is as new as Git. At least Google Code aren't declining in popularity, like sourceforge. And Google is large. So for those reasons I think I might try google code first.


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## dandelion (Dec 7, 2010)

SF pros, software there won't disappear:
- exist for more than a decade
- have many mirrors

I'd also consider Launchpad.


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## dandelion (Dec 8, 2010)

This may be not a Google Code only issue but I tend to bump into it practically every month.





> Project Hosting is currently READ-ONLY for network maintenance.


It sucks only if one can't defer a commit to later date, such is the case with centralized VCS (cvs, svn, etc).


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