Samiksha Jaiswal (Editor)

BerliOS

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Owner
  
Fraunhofer Society

Website
  
www.berlios.de

Commercial
  
No

Created by
  
FOKUS

Alexa rank
  
40,078 (April 2014)

Type of site
  
Collaborative revision control and software development management system

BerliOS (short for "Berlin Open Source") was a project founded by Fraunhofer FOKUS, the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems located in Berlin, to coordinate the different interest groups in the field of open source software (OSS) and to assume a neutral coordinator function. The target groups of BerliOS were developers and users of open source software on the one side and OSS-related companies on the other.

Contents

BerliOS consisted of several subprojects:

  • Developer, a hosting platform for open source projects similar to SourceForge.net, GNU Savannah and JavaForge
  • DocsWell, a database for open source related documentation
  • SourceWell, a news service for open source projects
  • SourceLines, a "best practice" database for successful open source projects
  • SourceBiz, a list of open source companies
  • DevCounter, a database of open source developer profiles
  • OpenFacts, a wiki-based open source knowledge database (using the MediaWiki software)
  • SourceAgency (beta), a platform for coordinating open source funding
  • Closure

    The operators of the BerliOS project announced that BerliOS would close at the end of 2011 due to lack of sufficient funding and support.

    As the news of the pending closure spread, BerliOS received numerous rescue proposals. As a result, it was further announced that BerliOS would continue as a non-profit institute run by a combination of volunteers, donations and corporate sponsorship.

    On February 23, 2012 BerliOS announced on their blog, that a cooperation agreement had been signed with SourceForge, which meant that all projects hosted on BerliOS' systems would be automatically mirrored in new and separate projects on SourceForge. On April 4, 2012 SourceForge reiterated this statement on their blog and provided more specifics about the collaboration.

    In January 2014 BerliOS announced that they would disable their hosting services on 30 April 2014.

    SourceForge mirror projects

    The mirrored projects on SourceForge was named after the following template; http://sourceforge.net/projects/${name}.berlios/, where ${name} would be the BerliOS project name.

    Project owner and creator was a specially crafted user named berliosrobot. This way former BerliOS projects can be found using SourceForge's search engine, like this.

    References

    BerliOS Wikipedia