OSDN

OSDN (formerly SourceForge.JP) is a web-based collaborative development environment for open-source software projects. It provides source code repositories and web hosting services. With features similar to SourceForge, it acts as a centralized location for open-source software developers.

The OSDN repository hosts more than 5,000 projects and more than 50,000 registered users. Registered software used to be mostly specialized for Japanese use, such as input method systems, fonts, and so on, but also included applications like Cabos, TeraTerm, and Shiira. Also, since the renewal of the brand name to OSDN, some projects that used to be developed on SourceForge moved to OSDN, such as MinGW, TortoiseSVN, Android-x86, and Clonezilla.

History
SourceForge.JP was started by VA Linux Systems (latterly SourceForge, Inc.) and its subsidiary VA Linux Systems Japan on April 18, 2002. OSDN K.K. spun off of VA Linux Systems Japan in August 2007. As of June 2009, OSDN K.K. was operating the SourceForge.JP.

On May 11, 2015, the site was renamed from "SourceForge.JP" to "OSDN". In the same month that OSDN changed the site name, SourceForge caused two controversies: DevShare adware and project hijacking. In contrast, OSDN totally refuses adware bundling and project hijacking. For that reason, the changing of the site name to OSDN is perceived to have been done based on criticism of and adverse reactions to SourceForge's monetization.

On February 26, 2020, it was announced on the site that OSDN was being transferred to Appirits, Inc., a Japanese software company.

Open Source China (OSChina) announced on 24 July 2023 that they had acquired OSDN in 2022. The site had reliability problems almost immediately after this announcement, and there was an effort by SourceForge (the original, American-based site) to recruit projects that might choose to leave OSDN; especially those using SVN, which would be unsupported on GitHub. Many projects did leave OSDN, including Vim and TeraTerm.

ITmedia NEWS reported on January 22, 2024 that OSDN had announced they would shut down the associated Slashdot Japan-successor site (Surado) at the end of January 2024. However, articles in ITmedia NEWS and Surado at the end of January reported that the closure of both sites had been cancelled and OSChina now hoped to keep them in operation while seeking acquirers to take them over.

Features
OSDN provides revision control systems such as CVS, SVN, Git, Mercurial, and every feature in SourceForge. What makes OSDN different from SourceForge is the bug tracking system and the wiki system. On OSDN, these are very Trac-like systems.