In the not so distant past, if you were a developer who wanted to make a software project available to the rest of the world, you had to build a website and distribute the code yourself. Many developers still access the internet through accounts with dynamic IP addresses, which make operating a website problematic, so most projects get released through universities which can supply static IP numbers. If you wanted to enable someone from outside your institution to contribute changes to the source code you had to set up the system yourself. For most developers, this was far too high an activation price to pay, and so many small OSS projects never saw the light of day.
Today, SourceForge[26] makes all of these services available to anyone and this is one of the biggest reasons behind the recent explosion in the number of OSS projects. Anyone can register as a user, and any user can register any number of projects on the system, provided the project is released under one of the currently accepted OSS licenses. SourceForge provides each project with a number of benefits including: a domain name, a website, an FTP repository, a source code repository, mailing list maintenance, bug tracking, and release management software.
The SourceForge statistics attest to its phenomenal success: it currently hosts over 200,000 developers, and more than 20,000 projects and because the software which runs SourceForge is itself OSS, there are now domain specific installations such as the Open Lab[27], a site dedicated to bioinformatics projects.