European Open Source Observatory keeps launching new Features
The European open source observatory opened up about one year ago, last February went into the wild 2.0 and now offers a free Virtual Forge service, aimed at giving a better understanding of hosted projects.
Europe keeps investing money to fund OSOR development, now trying to mimic Ohloh metrics and data, instead of spending energies to create synergies with others.
In the OSOR news  Marco Battistoni, Unisys OSOR Technical Manager, says (emphasis is mine):
However setting up and operating such a repository can be very costly and time consuming (believe us, we know!):Â one has to buy servers, internet connection, install the necessary applications, hire experts to operate the site 24/7… This needs a lot of commitment both in human and in financial resources.
I’d prefer to see our money spent to create something new, or simply to share knowledge about interesting open source projects and tools. There are definitely more forges than necessary.
Roberto Galoppini, 
451 CAOS Links (caostheory) 's status on Friday, 10-Jul-09 13:49:32 UTC - Identi.ca 2:49 pm on July 10, 2009 Permalink
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Stefano Canepa 9:37 pm on July 11, 2009 Permalink
I agree with you, there are so many places where a free software developer can host his/her project that it’s difficult to decide but no one help in sharing ideas, this could be of some help in cutting down the number of project doing the same thing and help developer to team up.
Roberto Galoppini 10:29 am on July 13, 2009 Permalink
Stefano don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that Europe is wrong having its own repository/forge. European public adminstrations have to deploy a long term sustainability plan when it comes to hosting projects. Today moving projects from a forge to another is not trivial, since data federation is still to come (and maybe Europe might well help towards this goal).
OSOR EC-funded project is spending big money, and I’d like to see most of these resources spent to better disseminate projects information.