An Ode to Sourceforge

Back in the day, circa before 2005, the land of the free open source dwellers lived in the land of sourceforge. Good old derivative of VA Linux, then VA Systems, then whatever else it morphed into– some sister company of the good ol' slashdot, until that and everything got bought out by now Dice sometime in 2013. Anyhow, I shall digress.

Sourceforge used to be the goto place for FOSS software. Man, I found so much good stuff their back in the day. Gaim, PDF Creator, Freemind and then Freeplane. Their POTM, Project of the Month, highlighter was awesome. Then like frequently happens, one good thing got surpassed by another. sf.net lossed some geek cred, and the developers went to the land of googlecode, and then onto github in 2008-2009.

They say that sourceforge with its dependency on advertisements irked people. Github with its subscription model was just more developer friendly, and frankly less annoying. But Github vs Google code? Both provided a VCS, subversion git what have you. Shoot, even now sf.net has git control supposedly. Github however made things just more transparent, fluid, and pleasant to the eye. One could actually more visibly see checked in code. This was awesome. Sure it took a little more to download stuff, whereas one would just download an exe or dmg in SF, in github one had to either use git to retrieve a file or download a momentary zip file.

Github, just plain and simple surpassed sf.net . One thing though I love about sf.net still though is file and FOSS project discover.

That being said, I’ve been kinda getting all nostalgic and reminiscent about things, when I discovered my new favorite piece of Foss software. Alas, and this time, it was not on sf.net. Mindmup found on github, json based, flowcharting and mindmapping software. Man, it was sometime way back when in 2005 and 2006 when I discovered Freeplane and Freemind on sf.net . That was the most awesome mindmapping tool. XML based, portable, free, it was the coolest thing next to slice bread. I used it for organization for a good year plus for many things.

Anyhow, mindmup just topples things over and surpassed the freeplane/freemind land. First off, it can be used on multiple computers, anywhere there is a browser, without installing an executable. Straight off, best feature, cross platform, and browser cloud based. Save it on localstorage, googledrive, dropbox, their own mindmup servers, or shoot even github. Portable not just the program but where you can save the files. Anywhere you got a browser. Man, that it authenticates and saves files on Google Drive–Awesome!!!! The only way it could/would be more awesome would be if it saved to Owncloud (thats another story….man I still gotta try and install that). Another thing, that makes freeplane and freemind so awesome, even if the program wasn’t installed, data portability was ensured in that one could open up the xml file and still find their data in the xml records. Well, for this old *.mup file (vs the old *.mm xml file), its json based. And what does that mean? Well, its a lot more coherent and compact to read.

Man, this has been a wandering blog, praising both sourceforge and then github–I still like ‘em both, but I’m finding more cool stuff on github now. I guess to close things off, Mindmup is an awesome tool, as awesome as Freemind and Freeplane ever were, and more portable and usable than the former tools. Also, I think I’m appreciating the value of JSON over XML, readability in the vast stores of metadata. Conciseness, less kilobytes of space, but gee, just making it a whole lot more readable.

JL