SAN FRANCISCO, April 4, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sourceforge.net, a website of Geeknet Media, a wholly owned subsidiary of Geeknet Inc. (Nasdaq:GKNT), today announced a recent collaboration with BerliOS to serve its downloads via SourceForge's global mirror network http://sourceforge.net
BerliOS launched in January 2000 by the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems (FOKUS). The initiative was aimed at fulfilling open source developers' needs, included but not limited to hosting their projects. In the last 12 years BerliOS attracted over 32,000 users and acquired about 5,000 projects.
"After announcing the closing of BerliOS last year, we received a few proposals from various sites. SourceForge was the only site that was not only interested in the BerliOS domain but in a collaboration at eye level." said Gerd Schuermann, FOKUS eGovernment Competence Center head.
"We contacted the Fraunhofer Institute to explore some ideas and it became clear that offering their projects the ability to use SourceForge for distribution was a good thing", according to Roberto Galoppini - SourceForge Sr. Director of Business Development. "In addition to the improved reliability through our global mirror network and better analytics, projects will be showcased to a larger community of users."
"BerliOS didn't look at SourceForge as a competitor forge, but as a directory of open source software. We have been looking for a network of mirrors since a while to increase our service quality. Since last year, SourceForge is fully Open Source again which is a great decision. The agreed way of collaboration allows us to keep the important legal features that result from BerliOS being hosted in Europe", said Joerg Schilling, BerliOS project leader.
As a trusted directory for open source software, SourceForge doesn't bundle the software people download from its network. Users get the original software release and nothing else. This announcement is the first time SourceForge has partnered with another forge.
ABOUT FRAUNHOFER FOKUS
The Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems, Fraunhofer FOKUS for short, is a Berlin-based research facility devoted to studying and developing communication and information technologies. In particular, it specializes in multi-domain networks and interoperable, user-centered solutions. With more than 20 years experience, Fraunhofer FOKUS is an important IT research partner for the telecommunications sector, the automobile industry, media services, and public administrations. It frequently cooperates with governmental agencies and software companies to create need-oriented e-government solutions and is a leading collaborator in projects funded by the European Union as well as by national-level sponsors. For further information: http://fokus.fraunhofer.de
ABOUT SOURCEFORGE
With a simple mission to help open source projects be successful, SourceForge.net is an online community dedicated to the development, distribution and support of open source software. As the trusted partner for open source, SourceForge has over 350,000 open source projects, 38.5 Million unique visitors per month, and averages 3.8 million downloads each day. * Sourceforge.net is a website of Geeknet Media, a wholly owned subsidiary of Geeknet Inc. (Nasdaq:GKNT).
ABOUT GEEKNET
Geeknet is home to some of the best-known brands in the geek universe, and is the online network for the global geek community. We serve an audience of over 53 million users each month and provide the tech-obsessed with content, culture, connections, commerce, and all the things that geeks crave. Want to learn more? Check out geek.net.
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Note(*) Source: Google Analytics August, 2011