What is a FOSPHost site?
A Free/Open Source Project Hosting (FOSPHost) site the infrastructure that supports and co-ordinates the development of Free/Open Source software projects on the Internet. One of the most famous example is SourceForge. Nevertheless, it can be as simple as a mailing list and a FTP server to download the components of the project.
External Hosting and Self-hosting
FOSPHost sites can also be classified as external hosting and self-hosting. The distinction between the two is the amount of control the users of the FOSPHost site have.
- Self-hosting sites - the users can adjust the internal configuration of the services provided
- External hosting sites - a fixed set of services is provided with a common configuration.
Advantages for External Hosting Sites
- More reliable than individually hosted servers (Q6.13)
- Tools with better quality than individually hosted sites (Q6.22)
- Decrease the startup cost of hosting an Free/Open Source Software (if the service is low cost or free) (Q6.13)
- Decrease the workload comparing to administrating a FOSPHost site individually (Q6.5)
Advantages for Self-hosting Sites
- Have control on the choice of tools hosted on-site and their configurations (Q7.10)
Further classification for External Hosting Sites -
Infrastructure and Non-infrastructure
Back to
Evaluation of FOSPHost Sites