One of the most interesting ways to get an idea where companies of interest are headed is by watching who they hire. That's one of the reasons why we launched Jobwire, our site tracking who gets hired in tech and new media. SourceForge, also the name of SourceForge and Slashdot's parent company, has made a couple of interesting hires lately.

The company told analysts in its final earnings call of this year that it is now limiting hiring to "a few key select positions and only when we can find exceptionally well qualified candidates who might be coming on to the market." Combine that statement with Brondsema's mention of a whole new project and we're pretty interested to see what SourceForge has come up with.

Earlier this month, we reported on the hire of a new CEO at SourceForge. Scott Kauffman will take the helm on January 5th. Kauffman has a diverse background, ranging from music to advertising companies.

Neither the company nor the new developer hired have responded to several inquires this morning about the new project. It won't likely be a software index, that's taken care of already, nor an open source development tutorial site - the company's already got one of those too.

What will it be? We look forward to finding out more.

Update: A spokesperson for the company contacted us today and confirmed that a new project is in the works but said that "SourceForge is not quite ready to talk about it just now over the holidays." Watch this space for coverage when the news is ready!

At this time, there are only three applications available in the new hosted format:

• LimeSurvey, Survey Application: Documentation, SourceForge.net Project Page
• MediaWiki, Wiki Application: Documentation, Reference Manual
• phpBB, Forum Application: Documentation

However, any existing application can now be enabled as a hosted app, too. This can be done from the new "Hosted Apps" Project Admin page, a link to which can be found under the "Admin" project navigation menu.

According to Ross Turk, director of community at SourceForge, "developers can be much more productive when they don't have to worry about maintaining their infrastructure, and this new offering allows them to use the tools they know and like without the burden of maintaining them."

Benefits Of Hosted Apps

This service was actually launched quietly a few weeks ago, as SourceForge insiders may already know. The announcement was then made via a forum posting which clued in members to the new service. But since the news only hit the mainstream channels today, we imagine this means that they're now ready for primetime.

That earlier announcement touted several benefits to using Hosted Apps, including the following:

• Eliminates the overhead of deploying supported applications; simply opt-in and begin using the application right away. No need to deal with config files and install procedures.
• Served from a dedicated database and web server pool, separate from the project web servers -- so you don't need to cope with the security limitations of project web's shared hosting environment, or project web's outbound mail and connectivity restrictions.
• They maintain the application code for Hosted Apps and will deploy updates as they become available from the vendor. This should reduce the risk from vulnerabilities found in the Hosted Apps and eliminate a major administrative burden (installing updates) to projects.
• They perform regular backups of the Hosted Apps data, but also provide you the ability to easily make application backups on-demand.
• They perform application testing, tuning and monitoring to ensure Hosted Apps operate properly. If service faults occur, they respond and fix the issues. If defects are found in the application (either through our own testing or through end-user report), they will repair the defects or raise the defect to the vendor for repair.
• All Hosted Apps make use of our centralized authentication infrastructure (users login with their SourceForge.net usernames and passwords) but retain the permissions (authorization) of the application (so, for example, existing users of MediaWiki will find permissions handling exactly as they expect).
• Since this offering is centrally managed, any improvements they make either to the infrastructure or to the Hosted Apps themselves will immediately become available to all projects. The Hosted Apps offering reduces their overhead for adding major new functionality to their offering, since all applications share common integration points and common infrastructure.
• Since Hosted Apps are available under an Open Source license, this centralized service has the potential to rapidly increase the user base of Open Source applications and drive high quality feedback for the further improvement of those applications.

Though GitHub is a pay service with a business model aimed squarely at commercial development shops in need of a secure, hosted, version control system, the company also offers a generous free package that would be suitable for many open source projects.

GitHub really comes together for most users when you start talking about the social features. Every user and project has a profile (here is one for co-founder Chris Wanstrath, and here is one for the Ruby on Rails project) which tracks progress and participation. Users and projects also have public activity feeds which display activity on public projects such as commits, comments, forks, etc.

Users have the option to follow specific developers or projects to keep tabs on their activity.

Some might wonder what the point of a centralized host for a decentralized, open source product really is -- i.e., is not Git meant to be installed locally? As Peter Cooper points out, "If you just want one reason why Github is relevant, it’s because the Web interface provides the connection BETWEEN hosted projects and the forks of them. Hosting your own Git repository is not hard [...] but co-ordinating efforts of forking and merging amongst people you don’t personally know is tough. With a system like Github, it becomes a lot easier."

In other words, what makes GitHub special is the social aspects. With so many high profile projects already on board, it's easy to imagine GitHub could be the next SourceForge.