SourceForge last March announced a new feature to buy or sell services for Commercial Open Source on SourceForge, eventually launched in early summer in beta. Right now SourceForge released its SourceForge Marketplace, and 512 Service Providers and 251 Projects are available.
Openbravo ERP is probably the most famous among the supported projects, nonetheless we should probably pay more attention to the (very) long tail. If we look at the estimation of the real number of active FLOSS projects done within FLOSSMETRICS, there are 18000 stable and mature projects out there.
The SourceForge Marketplace could help to monetize open-source projects, but can also foster communities and, even more interesting, super-communities.
Could products like SuiteTwo come to life within the SourceForge community?
European countries like Germany, Italy, Spain, France and UK sum up about 30% of the SourceForge’s 25 million unique visitors. Here there is clearly space to positively contribute to the European open source adoption.
Full Disclosure: I am on SourceForge.net Marketplace advisory board.
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