When we first launched Google Project Hosting back in 2006, we wanted to do what we could to encourage best practices around open source development. This was expressed in a variety of ways, one of which was tied into SourceForge’s namespace.
Here's how it used to work: people would create a project on Google Project Hosting, and if that project’s name was already in use at SourceForge, we would email that project’s administrator and ask them if it was cool to use the name again. Most of the time, the person creating the project on Google Project Hosting was the same person on SourceForge, looking to reserve the name on both.
Sometimes though, the project on SourceForge was inactive or had never been active, so we would manually approve the name on Google Project Hosting. In the last few years, it's almost always been the latter case where people want to use a name that has never been active, so we've stepped in to allocate that name to the new project leader.
Since this is, by a long shot, how most of these name arbitration requests have turned out, in the spirit of efficiency we've decided to shut down the SourceForge name check on November 22nd.
Happy hacking this Thanksgiving* and we hope you enjoy Google Project Hosting!
By Chris DiBona for the Google Project Hosting Team
