Hosting an open source project at several sites [closed]

Answer 1

I don't know about the ethics, but consider the practicalities:

• you will have to do multiple repeated uploads to several different sites, doing it to a single site can be a pain
• users won't know which site to report bugs at
• if you use the SVN/CVS/git repositories, you will have multiple copies of your code in different repositories - a very bad idea

I'm sure there are other problems. So stick to one site - I've been using Google Code for a small project I've just started (CSVfix, if anyone is interesed) and I can recommend Google as being very easy to set up.

Answer 2

I think this is fine, for the reason that each provider may have something you want. You should pick the services that are best for your project. For example:

• Google code has file hosting, but the issue management is terrible, so
• Launchpad has great bug tracking, but no wiki, and we use Mercurial, so
• Bitbucket.org has mercurial hosting etc..

So it might be reasonable to use Launchpad for bug tracking, and Google code for hosting files and wiki, and Bitbucket.org for hosting source.

Answer 3

as i has already been said having to maintain the code on several hosts will make it more trouble then it is worth. What you have to think is you would need to make sure that it uploads properly over several hosts, it would more then likely cause confusion to some over if one copy is legit and the others aren't which in turn could cause a bad name for the project before you even start. End of the day there are much more, better ways to spread the word of your project, social networking sites, specific related forums are two main ones for you to consider, either way you would be better off spending your time posting to several sites then you would uploading and maintaining code on several sites.

Answer 4

I would suggest choose your preferred host for your project. You can publish about your project on many forums. Exposure will come via search engines.

Answer 5

Services spanning these various hosts will be inconvenient and difficult to maintain. For the above mentioned reliance on search engines to generate traffic take care to chose a name that differentiates your project from the web noise. A clear indication that traffic will not arrive is if your project first gets a re-recommendation on spelling. Take for example the people who brought you the chattr project from GNU. Immediately chatr is suggested as the proper search and your traffic will suffer accordingly.

Answer 6

I consider having several (independent) mirrors to be a benefit for the community, because such distributedness assures more reliable accessibility of your public work, now and in future (it will survive the failure of any single hosting site).

That's why I want to keep track of the available diffeent options to publicly host open-source projects:

• Which public hosting sites for darcs projects are there?
• Which public Git hosting sites are there that are free software?

I believe it's rather ethical (or moral) to put some effort into ensuring that your public work is published in the most accessible way (well documented, and with some guarantees about it being accessible at any moment when someone is interested).

The effort for you to push your work to several places independently (I mean, they won't depend on each other) and manage all this is probably not really a nightmare (as suggested in some other answers here), especially with a DVCS. For example, one can even set up Git so that one pushes to several places with just one command.

I feel that unless you are forcing someone to read something done by you, but you are rather just putting your stuff somewhere for it to be findable and accessible if someone is interested, you are not egoistic or ego-whatever.