Sourcemorgue

Last fall I got all fired up about a fork of the GPL’ed Smultron editor for OS X which we called Saskatoon. The project died on the vine, so I zipped up the source code, posted it on Sourceforge, and sent an e-mail to the few dozen people subscribed to our announcement list.

In the aftermath, I noticed an interesting thing – with 30 downloads in one week, our “Activity Percentile” rose to 99.33%. Unless I’m misreading something, that means that only about 700 of the 100,000+ projects on Sourceforge were downloaded more than 30 times that week.

I appreciate the service that Sourceforge provides. (I think the interface may have been created by drunken monkeys, but that’s a separate rant). That said, I wonder if it’s wise for them to boast about hosting 100,000 projects when so many of those (mine included) are, by the numbers, of apparently of very little use to anyone.