OSDN (formerly SourceForge.JP) was a web-based

collaborative development environment A collaborative development environment (CDE) is an online meeting space where a software development project's stakeholders can work together, no matter what time zone or region they are in, to discuss, document, and produce project deliverables. ...

for

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

projects. It provided

source code repositories In version control systems, a repository is a data structure that stores metadata for a set of files or directory structure. Depending on whether the version control system in use is distributed, like Git or Mercurial, or centralized, like Subversi ...

and

web hosting service A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that hosts websites for clients, i.e. it offers the facilities required for them to create and maintain a site and makes it accessible on the World Wide Web. Companies providing web h ...

s. With features similar to

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service founded by Geoffrey B. Jeffery, Tim Perdue, and Drew Streib in November 1999. SourceForge provides a centralized software discovery platform, including an online platform for managing and hosting open-source soft ...

, it acted as a centralized location for open-source software developers. The OSDN repository hosted more than 5,000 projects and more than 50,000 registered users. Registered software used to be mostly specialized for Japanese use, such as

input method An input method (or input method editor, commonly abbreviated IME) is an operating system component or program that enables users to generate characters not natively available on their input devices by using sequences of characters (or mouse oper ...

systems, fonts, and so on, but also included applications like Cabos,

TeraTerm Tera Term (alternatively TeraTerm) is an open-source, free, software implemented, terminal emulator (communications) program. It emulates different types of computer terminals, from DEC VT100 to DEC VT382. It supports Telnet, SSH 1 & 2 and serial ...

, and

Shiira Shiira (シイラ, Japanese for the common dolphin-fish) is a discontinued open source web browser for the Mac OS X operating system. According to its lead developer Makoto Kinoshita, the goal of Shiira was "to create a browser that is better ...

. Also, since the renewal of the brand name to OSDN, some projects that used to be developed on SourceForge moved to OSDN, such as

MinGW MinGW ("Minimalist GNU for Windows"), formerly mingw32, is a free and open source software development environment to create Microsoft Windows applications. MinGW includes a port of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), GNU Binutils for Windows ...

TortoiseSVN TortoiseSVN is a Subversion client, implemented as a Microsoft Windows shell extension, that helps programmers manage different versions of the source code for their programs. It is free software released under the GNU General Public License. T ...

Android-x86 Android-x86 is an open source project that makes an unofficial porting of the Android mobile operating system developed by the Open Handset Alliance to run on devices powered by x86 processors, rather than RISC-based ARM chips. Developers Chi ...

, and

Clonezilla Clonezilla is an open-source suite of disk cloning, disk imaging and system deployment utilities. Clonezilla Server Edition uses multicast technologies to deploy a single image file to a group of computers on a local area network. Clonezilla was ...

History

SourceForge.JP was started by VA Linux Systems (latterly SourceForge, Inc.) and its subsidiary VA Linux Systems Japan on April 18, 2002. OSDN K.K. spun off of VA Linux Systems Japan in August 2007. As of June 2009, OSDN K.K. was operating the SourceForge.JP. On May 11, 2015, the site was renamed from "SourceForge.JP" to "OSDN". In the same month that OSDN changed the site name, SourceForge caused two controversies: DevShare adware and project hijacking. In contrast, OSDN totally refuses adware bundling and project hijacking. For that reason, the changing of the site name to OSDN is perceived to have been done based on criticism of and adverse reactions to SourceForge's monetization. On February 26, 2020, it was announced on the site that OSDN was being transferred to Appirits, Inc., a Japanese software company. Open Source China (OSChina) announced on 24 July 2023 that they had acquired OSDN in 2022. The site had reliability problems almost immediately after this announcement, and there was an effort by

(the original, American-based site) to recruit projects that might choose to leave OSDN; especially those using SVN, which would be unsupported on

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

. Many projects did leave OSDN, including Vim and

. ITmedia NEWS reported on January 22, 2024 that OSDN had announced they would shut down the associated Slashdot Japan-successor site (Surado) at the end of January 2024. However, articles in ITmedia NEWS and Surado at the end of January reported that the closure of both sites had been cancelled and OSChina now hoped to keep them in operation while seeking acquirers to take them over. Nonetheless, in March 2025, Surado (formerly

Slashdot ''Slashdot'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''/.'') is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site ...

Japan) announced that OSChina decided to close OSDN along with Surado at the end of March. As of early 2025, the OSDN.net web-site is no longer reachable for the public.

Features

OSDN provided revision control systems such as CVS, SVN,

Git Git () is a distributed version control system that tracks versions of files. It is often used to control source code by programmers who are developing software collaboratively. Design goals of Git include speed, data integrity, and suppor ...

Mercurial Mercurial is a distributed revision control tool for software developers. It is supported on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and other Unix-like systems, such as FreeBSD and macOS. Mercurial's major design goals include high performance and scalabi ...

, and every feature in SourceForge. What made OSDN different from SourceForge was the

bug tracking system Tracking system or defect tracking system is a software application that keeps track of reported software bugs in software development projects. It may be regarded as a type of issue tracking system. Many bug tracking systems, such as those used ...

and the

wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

system. On OSDN, these were very

Trac Trac is an open-source, web-based project management and bug tracking system. It has been adopted by a variety of organizations for use as a bug tracking system for both free and open-source software and proprietary projects and products. Tr ...

-like systems.

References

External links

* {{Bug tracking systems Free software websites Geeknet Internet properties established in 2002 Open-source software hosting facilities

History

Features

See also

References

External links