SourceForge is proud to announce a new neighborhood on our site – the Open Source Mirror Directory. This is an extension to our existing software directory, where we’ll be mirroring projects that are not hosted on SourceForge.
Why are we doing this?
We want the SourceForge software directory to be as useful as possible. When you come here to search for a piece of software, we want you to be able to find it. And if that software isn’t hosted on SourceForge, we still want you to be able to find it. Millions of people use SourceForge every day to search for Open Source software, and we want to give them the best experience possible, even if the best answer to their search is a project hosted elsewhere.
By mirroring these projects here, we come a step closer to that reality. And, in the process, we do those projects a small favor in return, providing another way to get to their website, and being part of their software distribution mirroring network. We’re putting your software in front of more than 40 million additional potential users a month.
Yes, there are a few other places that list free software products, but a number of them offer downloads that include unwanted addons like browser toolbars, install wrappers, and various other malware. This, in turn, undermines the trust and openness that should be at the core of free software, and that hurts everyone that cares about Open Source. We want to provide a place where you can trust that you’re only getting the exact product that was provided by the original packager.
SourceForge has always been about promoting Open Source, whether those projects are developed at SourceForge or elsewhere. Obviously, we prefer that projects are hosted on SourceForge, but mostly we love Open Source, and want to be part of promoting it in whatever ways we can.
What are we doing?
Starting immediately, we’re adding non-Sourceforge Open Source software projects to our software directory. This will include a description of the product, links to their official website, and a mirror of their software releases. We’ll be monitoring these projects so that we always have the latest releases available. You can see the complete current list of what we’re mirroring at https://sourceforge.net/mirror/projects/All/.
We’re starting slowly, adding projects from a number of different sources, and seeing what the impact is on our hosting infrastructure. So if your favorite project isn’t represented here yet, please be patient, we’re getting there.
You’ll be easily able to identify that a project is a mirror, rather than a SourceForge project, both by the URL, which will look like https://sourceforge.net/projects/hedgewars.mirror/, and by the the presence of the SourceForge Open Source Mirror Directory logo that appears in the top right corner of the page.
We want to hear from you.
If you have an Open Source project outside of SourceForge, we’d like to hear from you. If you want your project mirrored on our site, or if you don’t want your project mirrored on our site, please let us know. Or there’s any other service that we can extend to your project community, we’d like to hear that, too. Contact us at communityteam@sourceforge.net and we’ll be sure the message gets to the right people.