Managing Disparate Developers
By Charlie Cho
The company formerly known as VA Linux Systems once rode the fin-de-siecle wave of investor mania, parlaying the ticker symbol LNUX into a record-setting IPO. It spent its cash in many directions at once: adding well-known developers to the payroll, purchasing the popular community sites Slashdot and Freshmeat, and starting Linux.com and SourceForge.net. While the hardware business fizzled out, and Linux.com failed to become the all-encompassing destination for Linux resources that it was meant to be, SourceForge was a runaway hit.
Introduced in 1999, SourceForge is a free Web-based service for hosting and managing open-source software projects. Any project is welcome, even Windows software, as long as it's distributed under an open-source license. The product offers many resources that projects traditionally have had to provide for themselves: a home page, source code repository, mailing lists, bug tracking, software distribution, and most importantly, servers and bandwidth.
Developers have flocked to this free lunch served by VA. Notable projects currently in residence include the Python language and the Amanda tape backup program.
