Sourceforge is apparently still trashing around desperately trying to find a way to monetize what can only be a very resource intensive site to maintain. First they added the Sourceforge managed donation service (wonder how that is working for them?) and then the recent “Premium Sourceforge Subscriptions”.

Both of these services seem to miss the obvious, Sourceforge real customers are project maintainers, we are the one with whom it has a relationship, and it is to us that it is offering real value. Obviously its compelling to try to tap into the millions of users who must hit the site daily rather then the mere 75,000 or so of us who maintain projects, but I think it is misguided.

What They Are Offering

Better search tools for finding projects, better tech support, and better project monitoring, and better downloads. Except for tech support these seem like tools aimed at consumers, not creators. ### What I Would Pay For

Better metrics and statistics. For example, Sourceforge hasn’t updated the download numbers since Jan 31st. I’m afraid this is going to be like the 6 month outage that SF.net went through last year (or was that 2 years ago) when they failed to report 95% of page views and downloads. Also I’ve added a little web bug to keep track of web stats for my Sourceforge hosted site, but I might be willing to pay for something that did this for me. Better CVS server. The CVS server is pretty consistently slammed, and slow. A being hosted on the “premium” CVS server would be very appealing.

Better web hosting. SF offers a pretty complete web hosting, but the one thing I wanted to do (open a socket from PHP) wasn’t possible.

Things I Wouldn’t Pay For But Which Should Be Done

Better mailing list archives. I don’t understand why they don’t just use the mailman’s archiver (though it admittedly has issues), but the Sourceforge mailing list archives are worse then useless.