Would you use this service?

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

Hey guys

I’m really thinking about making the below described service available for free. What I’m in doubt about, is wether or not people would need/use it.
Here is a quote from my blog describing it:

[quote]Why hello!

I now have the logic for my site done, in pseudo-code. sigh I’m beginning to doubt if this is even going to be used so I’ll just lay my idea out:
It seems that projects is a hit to developers aswell as non-developers. At least, that is what the sections of the forums I visit tells me. Mostly you’d put open-source projects on sourgeforge, but is it definately not all people who likes their game/technology to be open-source. Those projects will end up on as a forum thread somewhere, where the OP could’ve posted links to facebook groups, tumblr blogs, twitter account and what-not. Then the project is all scattered around the interwebs, and people have to visit a ton of websites to get the latest news.

I want to fix that, by making an online service where people can put their projects up. It will contain information, pictures, a blog and ratings depending on the project-owners decisions. You’ll even be able to rechieve an e-mail when your favourite projects gets updated, with new pictures or a new blog post.

But, I’m unaware if people even needs that kind of service (It’ll be 100% free). So, I don’t want to write a myriad of code if this kind of site is dead from the beginning.
[/quote]

#2

It certainly is a nice idea, but there are a lot of caveats.

#1 - Trust. People will avoid open-source options if they don’t want their source code to be shared. They would need to trust you not to share or steal their code.
#2 - Lots of bandwidth. My own personal projects take up several gigabytes, and there’s a lot of transferring going on for art assets and the like.
#3 - Reliable network. If it goes down just once, people won’t use it. I would be upset if I couldn’t get at my source code.

And more…

#3

Thanks for your reply. :smiley:
If people choose their project to be closed source, no code will be transferred between the site (which is me…) and the project-owner. If, however it is open-source there will be an option to download/upload it. My application is for presenting and following development only, so I might just go with a link to the sourgeforge page where the project is located for developers (assuming that everyone uses sourceforge).
I have my website hosted in Denmark by One.com which is so nice to offer unlimited bandwidth, aswell as a guarentee for 100% uptime, to avoid problems for commercial sites. The only thing I’m concerned about is space. I do not have a lot of space, so if I reach a high amount of users/projects, with a high amount of pictures I will need to extend storage on my server (which I think would not be a problem with that amount of users, and google-ads).

It will be free, but I will have to show one ad banner per page, and that only covers storage. If my application did not have the option to upload pictures of your project, there would not be need for banners :smiley:

Edit:
I might have expressed myself oddly. There will always be options to upload your project if you wish to share it. If that is a closed source project, which for the example could be a game, you can upload your client, obfuscated, in a .jar, with only class files.
I mean that I’m most likely not going to support browsing code and developing, but downloading and following development.

#4

There are already plenty of sites where you can upload programs to be downloaded, like download.com. The only change I see is that your going to be allowing libraries. Tbh all of the rest of your features (like a blog) are standard on a few other project hosting sites.

It looks unique, but not that unique. It might be nice as a compiled alternative to PasteBin. I believe what puts off a lot of people from using project hosting sites is all of the project management, so if you can just dump your library/app somewhere online quickly then that would be great. However then your just a file hosting service.

But I think I would use it if it was well built (emphasis on well built) because one of the big things that annoys me with lots of the project hosting sites online is the requirement for your code to be open source.