SourceForge breaks the 100,000 open source project barrier!

For a few years I’ve been following many of the projects on Sourceforge.net and use several of them personally. Projects such as Audacity, Filezilla, Gallery, Gimp, Fire, Streamripper, and many others. Imagine my delight when I visited the site tonight and saw that, “SourceForge.net Surpasses 100,000 Projects!” Seems like it was late last Fall when there were approximately 85,000 projects. Why the surge?

If you don’t already know, “SourceForge.net is the world’s largest Open Source software development web site, providing free hosting to tens of thousands of projects. The mission of SourceForge.net is to enrich the Open Source community by providing a centralized place for Open Source developers to control and manage Open Source software development. To fulfill this mission goal, we offer a variety of services to projects we host, and to the Open Source community.”

What I’m about to write will definitely “out” me as the closet geek I am: sometimes I’ll grab my laptop in the evening and browse the projects on Sourceforge. While this may seem a little bizarre (or make you wonder, “how boring *is* this guy anyway?”), every one of the projects I listed above were ones I stumbled across on Sourceforge by just poking around.

There are some really great personal computer-based projects and they’re quick to download and try out. What I some times wrestle with though, is that I’m not technically competent enough to perform due diligence on the features, function, code and merits of projects that are enterprise-class in scope. Still, when I’m told by a Gartner analyst that, “…and Compiere ERP/CRM is quickly becoming ready for prime-time and is close to midlevel enterprise-class” I sit up and take notice. Adding to this analyst’s view of the merit of Open Source projects and the effort and energy being expended on them, the home page of the Sourceforge site states in part:

“…we’ve seen an amazing surge in projects posted to SourceForge.net over the past several months. We think this is due in part to the traction that Open Source is making in the enterprise as more and more companies and organizations begin to migrate and adopt Open Source technologies.”

Hmmm….are we at critical mass with Open Source software?