The Berlios open source software repository will continue to operate, says Jörg Schilling, responsible for Berlios at Fraunhofer Fokus, a research institute in the German capital Berlin. Berlios' future is being assured by the Sourceforge open source software repository: "We are not closing down."

"Berlios is moving to new hardware, we have installed a new and much bigger file server and are now collaborating with the Sourceforge download mirror system", Schilling explains by email earlier this week. "The download mirror at Sourceforge is up and running since Saturday 18 February."

In a message posted on the Berlios development blog on 23 February, the project gives some more details about the cooperation with Sourceforge. The administrators explain that all the projects hosted at Berlios are now automatically available from any of the Sourceforge mirrors. The institute will continue to manage their own Berlios server in case these mirrors are offline, or if files can not be found on these mirrors, or if a download is from a country on the United States' list of embargo countries.

Funds
The Fraunhofer Fokus research institute is working on a new statute for the platform. Schilling expects that the renewed Berlios will also renew its focus on hosting development projects involving public administrations. The institute is one of the 18 institutes and IT companies involved in Qualipso a research project on open source, funded by the European Commission for some 10 million euro.

The institute announced on September 30 that it would close down Berlios at the end of the year, as it was running out of funds to host the site. Following that announcement, nearly five hundred projects moved to other software forges, says Schilling. "We now have more than 4800 projects. Before we announced to discontinue Berlios we had almost 5300 projects. That is a noticeable loss."

More information:
Berlios Sourceforge cooperation announcement (in German)
Berlios mailing list page
Qualipso
Sourceforge