OSDN (SourceForge.JP)

» see osdn.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I never had a project on it. The only relationship most people outside Japan ever had with OSDN was a download link at the end of a search, one file at a time, no account and no reason to come back. The site was in Japanese and that alone was enough to keep the rest of the world at the edge of it.

It opened on 18 April 2002 as SourceForge.JP, run by VA Linux Systems together with its Japanese arm. The American company licensed the name and the software across, and Japan got a forge in its own language with its own mailing lists. For twenty years that was where a particular kind of Windows utility lived, the sort with a readme nobody had translated and a version number that had been climbing since 2003.

The Japanese operation outlived the arrangement that created it. OSDN K.K. was spun out of VA Linux Systems Japan in August 2007, and on 11 May 2015 the site dropped the SourceForge name entirely. That was not a contract expiring. The American SourceForge had spent the preceding period bundling adware into its installers and taking over the pages of abandoned projects, and the Japanese site wanted daylight between the two of them.

At its size it held more than 5,000 projects and around 50,000 registered accounts, and alongside the forge it ran Srad, the Japanese Slashdot, which had been publishing since 2001. Neither number is enormous. Both of them were the whole local ecosystem.

~ the record ~

~ the sale ~

Appirits took the site over in an arrangement announced on 26 February 2020. Then in 2022 it changed hands again, to Open Source China, and this time nobody told the users until July 2023. The announcement and the outages arrived in the same week.

People reported osdn.net being unreachable on and off for more than a week. By 31 July the American SourceForge had published an open invitation to any OSDN project that wanted to move, offering to take their repositories and their downloads. Vim left. Tera Term left. For a code forge that is the only failure that counts, because the hosted thing is the entire reason anyone types the address.

~ the year of not dying ~

On 22 January 2024 the owner announced that Srad and OSDN would both close on 31 January, which is nine days of notice for a two decade archive. Then on the 31st it reversed itself and said the sites would stay up while a new home was found for them. That search ran for more than a year and produced nothing.

It was called off on 14 March 2025 with a termination date of 31 March. The site stopped answering entirely around 9 April. Open Source China kept the domain names, with the stated possibility of using them for something else later.

~ what got buried with it ~

Losing a national code forge is a strange kind of loss, because the software itself mostly survives. Anything that still had a maintainer had been mirrored or moved by 2024. What actually goes is the address: two decades of bug threads and release notes that other pages had linked to, all of it now resolving to nothing at all.

Japan had built one of the few genuinely local alternatives to an American default and kept it alive for twenty three years, which is longer than most of the American originals managed. Then it went to an owner who ran out of reasons to pay for it. The domains are still owned by somebody. That is not the same thing as the site existing.

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