BerliOS

» see berlios.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

berlios.de is an address i typed without ever visiting the site, and that was the normal relationship people had with it. you were building something on linux and the readme handed you a download url that pointed at developer.berlios.de. you never saw the front page or wondered who was paying for the disk. a forge is plumbing. plumbing gets used constantly by people who could not name it if you asked them the next day.

the fraunhofer institute for open communication systems opened it in january 2000 out of berlin, and the name is nothing more than berlin open source. the reasoning was partly technical and partly political. european open source work, and public-sector code in particular, had a reason to want a home answerable to europe rather than to a company in california. jörg schilling, who wrote cdrtools and spent his career at fraunhofer, is credited as its author.

it grew into a complete forge, with version control and bug trackers underneath and a spread of side services carrying names like docswell and sourcewell that were meant to make it more than a code dump. by 2011 it was carrying over four thousand seven hundred projects for roughly fifty thousand registered accounts and serving two point six million file downloads a month. for a national research project that is not a small operation.

i cannot claim i understood any of that at the time. what i knew was that certain downloads came out of germany and were slower than the ones from sourceforge, which on a turkish line in the mid 2000s was the only property of a mirror i had an opinion about.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what a forge actually was ~

before github there was no default. if you wrote something and wanted other people to have it, you applied to a forge, and the forge gave you a subdomain with a subversion repository and a mailing list behind it. sourceforge was the large one. everything else was a regional or ideological alternative to sourceforge, and berlios managed to be both at once.

the case for a german forge was never that sourceforge was bad. it was that a research institute funded out of public money had reasons to want code hosted somewhere accountable to the people funding it, and in 2000 that argument was much easier to make than it sounds now. fraunhofer paid the bill. the projects were not charged, and for eleven years nobody had to think about where the money came from.

~ the reprieve ~

on 30 september 2011 the operators posted that berlios would close on 31 december. the wording was plain about it. there was not enough community support to put the platform on a sustainable financial footing, and no partner or sponsor had appeared whose terms fit what berlios was for. slashdot ran it, mailing lists filled up with people asking where four thousand projects were supposed to move to.

then it did not close. rescue offers came in, a non-profit association was registered in november to run the platform on donations and volunteer hours, and in february 2012 berlios signed an agreement with sourceforge to mirror every hosted project across automatically. the code was safe after that. the site was not, because a volunteer association had inherited a server bill without inheriting the institute that used to pay it.

~ where the code went ~

the forge went quiet some time before it went dark. developer.berlios.de was still answering in october 2013 and was returning errors by the middle of november. in january 2014 the operators announced that hosting would be disabled on 30 april, and that is the date on the stone. the berlios.de front page stayed up for years afterward with nothing behind it, which is its own kind of ending.

almost everything survived, and that is the unusual part of this grave. archive team crawled the whole forge in july 2012 and the repositories came down over rsync. the mailing lists and release files sit in the internet archive today, and a github account called backuptheberlios still holds the repositories. what was actually lost was the address, and for over a decade of german open source the address was where the code was.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »