I hit on a message on the Subversion mailing list that there were Solaris packages for the latest version of Subversion on a site called Blastwave. This is a site I had never heard of and thought it was pretty cool that the latest version of the Subversion distribution was available so quickly on a site.

I had this message bookmarked in my mail to go back to later. As I hit the site this morning I found a message on the title page about the possible closing of the site due to lack of funding. Apparently, the operators have been trying to get corporate funding for this service for a while to no avail.

I would think this would be something Sun would want to contribute to given their recent opening of the Solaris Operating System to garner support. Apparently it is already a well established community dedicated to more than just the version of Solaris just opened, but supports packages for earlier versions of Solaris as well.

This is pretty sad. For the longest time I had frequented sunfreeware.org until performance made it more cost effective for me to build the software on my own. If blastwave has decent performance and gets the most recent packages for a given software suite built as quickly as they did for Subversion 1.2.3, it would be in the Solaris communities best interest to support it.

This is the biggest problem I think we have right now. While the internet is a commons that anyone can contribute to, it is very difficult to fund efforts like this that provide a community service without a revenue model behind it.