A 2008 news report introduced TuxFamily.org as follows: “ Present on the Internet since 1999, TuxFamily.org provides free hosting services for all projects under a free license and thus allows the promotion of free software in all its forms (free art, free software, etc.). »
Recently, we mentioned a DNS incident at TuxFamily.org with loss of our two DNS (between December 9, 2024 around 11 p.m. or midnight, and December 10 8:38 a.m.) and a need to switch DNS to come back online. On the TuxFamily website, the news page has only reported incidents since 2019. So one user ended up politely asking the question (in English) « Is TuxFamily slowly dying? “, because there have been many incidents, some not mentioned in the news and there are access concerns due to old crypto libraries being left unaddressed. Is it a motivation problem, a temporary dip, how can I help?
And the answer arrived, thanking the asker for asking: yes TuxFamily.org is dying, yes the motivation is gone, everything has become old: the people, the machines, the data centers, the architecture of the services. TuxFamily.org would no longer be technically relevant and the efforts to just maintain it are no longer sufficient. And even more clearly said: the truth is that the best things to do are: 1. migrate your project out of TuxFamily.org (…) 2. talk about it, here or outside of TuxFamily.org, so that other remaining projects have a list of suggestions of hosts.
Concerning LinuxFr.org: DNS management will not be handed over to TuxFamily.org (see follow-up entry). We would like to thank TuxFamily.org and the people behind it for years of service. And we regretfully stop praising this host: it is no longer listed in the friendly projects in our footer and the banner displayed in rotation has been removed.
TuxFamily.org uses VHFFS as a technical solution (the latest version presented on LinuxFr.org is 4.4 and the last version published is 4.6 in October 2016).
Souvenirs
TuxFamily.org is for example the host of Kaos Fantasy, and was the host of Lent Ciné, and many other projects. It is also the host of many mailing lists.
Note: this is far from being a first, many other software forges have closed and forge tools have disappeared, such as Berlios.de, Google Code, Gitorious, Alioth (Debian), Betavine, CodeHaus, CodePlex , Fedora Hosted, Gna!, java.net, Phabricator, Tigris, Mozdev, LibreSource, Codendi, InDefero, CodingTeam, Django-Simple-Forge, Anvil, etc. (list taken from Wikipedia and the article “Software forges and hosting of free projects”). We have also seen migrations from Sourceforge to TuxFamily.org for example.
