The GForge Story
Back in 1999, I left the Principal Financial Group and joined a dotbomb startup called "VA Linux Systems" (formerly "VA Research") and moved out and lived in a hotel for a few months in SunnyVale, California. I fooled around the VA office for 2 months without much to do, when they finally assigned me to the team to create a community project hosting system.
VA was already hosting a bunch of random open source things in a scattershot fashion and they were also trying to build up a network of sites like Linux.com and some others, basically as a form of advertising. At this time, VA was a linux hardware reseller with a lot of startup cash to burn.
The initial scope of this hosting site was just that, hosting these scattershot projects in an organized system. There was no real budget and the hardware we used was rejected and even repossessed servers from VA Linux customer sites. Most of the servers had major defects which is why they were sent back by customers.
As we got deeper into the project, we started adding more interesting features as we thought them up, like the concept of monitoring for file releases, crude document creation before wikis were really used, etc.
At this time, the site hadn't really been named yet. The 4 of us who were the core engineering team were big into "The Matrix" and we all had dual monitor setups with the matrix screensaver running at every opportune moment. So some of us were pushing to call the site 'SourceMatrix'. This was overridden by Marketing, in a move that probably was wise in the end, and we called it SourceForge.
Probably the smartest thing we did was gathered up a bunch of VA staff and pre-populated the system with projects, so on day one, it appeared there was a lot of content and activity.
A month or so later, Andover.net started unveiling their project hosting site, which looked suspiciously similar to ours. Worried that SF would be smashed in its infancy by the larger Andover (slashdot) company, VA open sourced the code to SourceForge as a marketing and positioning move. The code was a mess and no one could figure out how to install it, but it took off and multiple different people began using and modifying it. Interestingly enough, VA bought Andover a few weeks later.
Some months later, VA began getting inquiries from major companies about offering professional services to install the SF code, and a PS group was set up to deal with this. However, they had little luck as the product was immature, open source, and they were wanting WAYYYY too much money. In some cases, millions of dollars.
Also around this time, the hardware business was flatlining as the dotcom implosion hit hard. Many of VA's customers were dotbomb companies themselves like eToys. As things got really dire, everyone in the hardware area was fired and the whole business shut down. The company changed its name to VA Software and quietly closed the SF codebase. Shortly after this, I left VA and messed around the house in Iowa for a few months, spending my time reading, building models and generally being bored. About a year later, I started working again on the SourceForge code and spent a lot of effort ripping out a lot of stuff that made it hard to install, and eventually published it at gforge.org.
This garnered a lot of publicity, not because the code was great, but because it was a rebel cause and a lot of fun for several months. It was extremely active and fast-moving. Obviously a lot of people were using the system, but it was still way too hard and way to messy to install, and once installed, way too brittle. By the end of 2005, I decided to redesign and rebuild the whole thing using my engineering staff at GForge Group. And that's where we are now!
Eventually, the commercial SourceForge business fizzled and was sold off and VA Software was renamed yet again - this time SourceForge Inc! All that is left of the old VA Research/Linux/Software business is SourceForge.net and Andover.net.