On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 2:09 PM, Peter Murray <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Jul 15, 2011, at 2:59 PM, Mike Taylor wrote:
>>
>> Isn't this pretty much what FreshMeat is for?
>>        http://freshmeat.net/
>
> It is similar in concept to Freshmeat, but the scope is limited to library-oriented software (which might be too use-specific for Freshmeat and certainly harder to find among the vast expanse of non-library-oriented stuff).

You might look at NITRC[1], which has tried very hard to do the same
thing for neuroscience software in addition to providing project
hosting like Sourceforge. They get funded by some federal grant
thing[2].

Unfortunately, they've also found that the world wasn't really looking
for a site to review and host a small subset of open-source projects,
so their usage isn't high. They've convinced some projects to come
live in their domain, so they seem to attract enough funding to stay
online, but they've never succeeded in becoming much of a community.
And the "people who do neuroscience" crowd is probably two orders of
magnitude larger than the "people who do open-source in libraries"
crowd -- so building a vibrant community will be even harder in this
case.

The real problem for me is that their site doesn't seem to warrant
enough attention to really be made usable or stay up reliably. So if
you want to get software that's hosted only by them, it can be really
frustrating. It's like a crappy FreshMeat combined with a crappy,
unreliable Sourceforge.

My ultimate take: you can probably do something more interesting with
your grant money than building a FreshMeat-alike.

Either way, you might talk to the NITRC folks about their experiences
-- I'm speaking as an end-user, not as one of their team.

Cheers,
-Nate

1: http://www.nitrc.org/

2: The National Institutes of Health Blueprint for Neuroscience Research