SourceForge CVS problems for WEEKS?

Maybe I’m the last person to realize this, since I don’t work on SourceForge projects anymore (OpenSymphony moved from SF to java.net a couple years ago), but apparently SourceForge CVS has been having serious issues for almost a month now. Check the site status page for yourself to see! How do projects survive like this? Doesn’t JBoss still use SF?

That’s really bad for the open source community. Perhaps uber-communities just can’t scale. Java.net actually has been having some serious hiccups as well. Indeed, if you’re fed up with their quality of service, check out smaller communities like OpenSymphony and OpenQA. We’re always looking for quality projects to join the team.

OpenSymphony is specifically for Java frameworks and components (as opposed to complete applications), and OpenQA is specifically for any testing/automation tool, regardless of language. Both provide their own infrastructure: SVN, JIRA bug tracker, Confluence wiki, continuous integration, XMPP chat server, Jive forums, project blog support, and FishEYe.

Of course, all of this is provided by generous donations from the companies that make those products, and hosting is provided by Contegix. Contegix provides top-notch service for free, managing all these different software installations, as well as providing almost instant support response times.

To date, they have fielded over 600 emails for OpenSymphony and almost 200 for OpenQA. All for free, and always without any serious downtime like SourceForge is having. I think that says a lot about Contegix, and also a lot about the viability of large scale vs small scale open source communities.