Sep
16
Today, we're happy to announce the launch of Ideavine, a different kind of open source hosting service. The goal of Ideavine is to provide full-stack hosting for projects that are interested in making a sustained positive contribution to the open source ecosystem on the .NET platform.
There are already plenty of sites, like CodePlex, Sourceforge, and Google Code, that provide hosting for open source projects. These sites are great in the early stages of a project, to provide a home while things are still coming together. However, they only offer some of the tools that are necessary for running an open source project. They also suffer from a low signal-to-noise ratio -- that is, there are a large number of projects, most of which have been abandoned or aren't ready for prime time.
At Ideavine, we want to take things to the next level. Once a project has gained traction, we can step in and provide all of the necessary tools to make it successful over the long term. That includes web hosting for a project homepage, Subversion for source control, an issue tracker, a wiki for documentation and collaboration, and a build system for continuous integration. We also provide aggregated RSS feeds to make it easier for users to subscribe to updates for bug fixes, documentation changes, and any other information related to the projects we host.
Through this hosting solution, we hope to bring more visibility and legitimacy to open source software on the .NET platform. We are strong believers that open source is just another way of doing business, and the work of open source developers can help all sorts of projects -- commercial and non-profit alike. As such, we only host projects whose licenses allow them to be used in commercial software.
Ideavine is a non-profit venture started by James Avery and Nate Kohari, and funded by The Lounge advertising network. All proceeds from advertisements displayed on the site go toward paying for hosting costs. We're currently hosting only two projects: Subtext, a popular open source blogging engine, and Ninject, a dependency injection framework. If you manage an open source project built with .NET, and are interested in working with Ideavine, first take a look at our hosting guidelines. If you feel your project would be a good fit, feel free to submit an application for hosting!
There are already plenty of sites, like CodePlex, Sourceforge, and Google Code, that provide hosting for open source projects. These sites are great in the early stages of a project, to provide a home while things are still coming together. However, they only offer some of the tools that are necessary for running an open source project. They also suffer from a low signal-to-noise ratio -- that is, there are a large number of projects, most of which have been abandoned or aren't ready for prime time.
At Ideavine, we want to take things to the next level. Once a project has gained traction, we can step in and provide all of the necessary tools to make it successful over the long term. That includes web hosting for a project homepage, Subversion for source control, an issue tracker, a wiki for documentation and collaboration, and a build system for continuous integration. We also provide aggregated RSS feeds to make it easier for users to subscribe to updates for bug fixes, documentation changes, and any other information related to the projects we host.
Through this hosting solution, we hope to bring more visibility and legitimacy to open source software on the .NET platform. We are strong believers that open source is just another way of doing business, and the work of open source developers can help all sorts of projects -- commercial and non-profit alike. As such, we only host projects whose licenses allow them to be used in commercial software.
Ideavine is a non-profit venture started by James Avery and Nate Kohari, and funded by The Lounge advertising network. All proceeds from advertisements displayed on the site go toward paying for hosting costs. We're currently hosting only two projects: Subtext, a popular open source blogging engine, and Ninject, a dependency injection framework. If you manage an open source project built with .NET, and are interested in working with Ideavine, first take a look at our hosting guidelines. If you feel your project would be a good fit, feel free to submit an application for hosting!
