Greg Auger • fluteflute

Wikipedia may have a long list of open source hosting facilities but for me the choice in reality the choice is far smaller, between Launchpad, Sourceforge and Google Code. The reason? Time and time again I find projects hosted on these websites. They’re reliable and aren’t going to dissapear any time soon.

All three are themselves mostly proprietary software, although Launchpad has plans to open source within the next year. I am a great fan of Google products (although if there is an open source alternative it usually wins) using GMail, Google Reader and Google Search religously. On the other hand I am a great fan of Ubuntu and Canonical (even though I currently use Debian). As for Sourceforge, it seems to be used by such a large range of projects, even if Wikipedia brings up some worrying information about it’s forced proprietary license.

As far as the actual sites themselves go:

• Sourceforge does absolute everything you could wish for (now including wikis and forums) except perhaps bzr hosting. Perhaps my favourite feature is the ability to design your own webpages and have sourceforge host them. All this aside though, IMO Sourceforge is ugly, although I admit the recent(ish) redisign is a massive improvement.
• Google Code provides only the essentials: downloads, a basic wiki, bug tracker and then most importantly svn hosting. Of course forums/mailing lists are easily available through Google Groups, and calenders through Google Calender.
• Launchpad is very visually appealing and easy to use I find. It’s not perfect, lack of wiki support and other small issues exist, e.g. I would prefer for file downloads to be more prominently featured. It’s the only one here to support bzr (and forces bzr upon you) but that’s not really an issue for me as I use bzr anyway.

In conclusion: Sourceforge is ugly but does practically everything (but has that horrible license issue). Google Code is simple and clean for svn hosting. Launchpad also looks nice (although not so much as Google) and is under continual development, constantly improving.

So which will I use, as I can see strong justifications for all three? Probably Launchpad, simply because I’m familiar with it through Ubuntu (and Ubuland). It seems to me though that any major projects should have their own website, every project has different needs.