SourceForge - From 0 to 150.000 projects in 8.5 years

SourceForge was launched in November 1999 by company VA Linux. The company was later renamed to VA Software (2001) and then to SourceForge, Inc (2007).

SourceForge is the largest repository for open source projects. In Aug 2008 more than 180.000 open source projects are hosted.

Open source projects could be loaded to SourceForge from Nov 1999 onwards.

During the first month 184 were registered on SourceForge.

At least 184 of them still existed in April 2008 when I checked the data. It is possible to delete projects from SourceForge, but the number of deletions is fairly low (I will analyse this is a later post).

The first day was Nov 4^th, 1999. 11 projects had been registered then. E.g.

gedit http://sourceforge.net/projects/gedit/

Xemacs http://sourceforge.net/projects/xemacs/

Mesa3D http://sourceforge.net/projects/mesa3d/

Enlightenment http://sourceforge.net/projects/enlightenment/

All still very active nearly 9 years later.

The following growth was huge. Each year more projects were registered than the year before.

10.000 projects were reached after 1.5 years.

100.000 projects were reached after 6.5 years.

The current count is 180.000 projects – after 8.5 years.

I have started to collected SourceForge data in April 2008 (technical details will be another post).

The number of projects I use for my analysis are 148.711 (until around April 2008), or 139.771 when I compare complete years 2000 – 2007.

The early growth was exponential. At the moment there is a linear growth, 2007 was the first year when less projects were registered than in the year before. It was a tiny difference only, -150. We will see how the trend continues in 2008.

I expect a decreasing growth in the years ahead.

Year	SF new projects per year
1999 (2 months)	408
2000	5.302
2001	9.825
2002	13.617
2003	15.429
2004	18.979
2005	21.588
2006	27.591
2007	27.440
2008 (3 months)	8.164

A slower growth must not be a bad thing. The number of programmers working on open source projects is growing, but limited.

It’s fun to create a new project – and more ego-boosting, but perhaps it makes more sense to support an already existing project.

Growth of existing projects instead of new projects

And who needs 180.000 different software projects?

Of cause this is the number of registered projects. The number of active projects will be smaller. How much smaller I will try to find out.

In the chart above the gray area represents the huge project growth from zero to 150.000 projects in 8.5 years.

I will try to bring some structure into this gray area.