Berlios closing down

Do you always joke at funerals?

Yes, but it's the Fraunhofer Society... I worked there for a little bit and you really notice that it's partially state owned and usually full of people trying to get their PhD and then leave. That also means that they get funding for writing papers, not for actually maintaining something.

That also might be why they have the weird chart on the frontpage (http://i.imgur.com/TTSFn.png), it's probably straight out of some report :-/

I guess my 'rant' kind of shows how annoying I think this kind of institution is when it comes to dealing with something as quickly moving and interesting as the internet. Although they employ a lot of people and have a large sum of money, they don't seem to be able to create any of the cool things people actually use or really innovate. The main focus is usually on something that they're able to sell to somebody managing somewhere at the State. Something like "we're developing the next b2b exchange format for selling services in the cloud." This usually means writing a lot of papers and reports and projects, looking for somebody big in the industry to 'work with' and then releasing a somewhat crappy demo implementation of it that then dies after the last paper has been written.

Sorry about the rant, I somehow get annoyed when I see that much time and money being wasted. I'm sure they do some cool stuff, but the majority of it just seems like a fire to throw money into.

Be careful, any code you download from there might be trojaned: http://lwn.net/Articles/369633/ If I recall last years events correctly, they (i.e. Jörg Schilling) were not very open in their resonse, some mails from the time describe their information policy as "stonewalling", http://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/cdrecord-support/2010-Janu...