There are several services to host your project’s code on the web for free. But recently there’s been some outages on “very reliable” services like Gmail, Amazon and let’s not get started with Twitter. Also some service policies may bother you like Google code rejecting a lot of software licenses, and Facebook will never delete your data from their servers. You must start thinking on a better way to publish the code for a project of yours.
The Free Software Foundation published an article about the free project hosting alternatives Sourceforge, Google Code and Launchpad, and what the problems are for each. They recommend Savanah, the free software hosting for free or open source projects.
El artículo de la FSF esta disponible también en español
What’s nice about it is that if you don’t want to host your code on their servers, you can download the code and host it on your own.
But if hosting is not your main concern, I like the fact that, because its free software, it can rapidly respond to support requests.
The features of savanah are:
- Support for CVS, Subversion, GNU Arch, Git and Mercurial
- Integrated bug tracking system
- Mailing lists
- And downloads area with mirrors
This is the only service I know that provides support for so many version control systems and its completely free. Since I use Git, this is great because I no longer have to be on the non-free (nor as in beer, or as in freedom) Github anymore, and with the features a big player like Sourceforge has.
UPDATE: Gitorious is another free software project hosting platform that you can also download and host yourself. As the name implies, this one only supports Git and its a very good alternative to Github.
The matrix code image is provided by David Asch under Creative Commons
The Levitating, Meditating, Flute-playing Gnu logo is a GNU GPL’ed image provided by the Nevrax Design Team.
The Free software hosting for free or open source projects by Gabriel Saldaña, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Mexico License.
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I'm a free software enthusiast, Emacs addict, tea drinker, amateur photographer and love rock music and extreme sports.
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