Patrick McGovern, director of Sourceforge.net, says that Australia had been crying out for its own Sourceforge download site for some time.
"I know there's been a lot of interest in that part of world, and we're very excited to be able to cater to the open source developers in Australia and the region," he told ZDNet Australia.
The 110Gb mirror is being hosted by ISP and voice provider Flow Communications. Flow's manager of IP network development, Colin Horsington, says that since they sent the Sourceforge mirror "live" there have been constant downloads.
"We've got anywhere between 10-15mbps [downloading] constantly... which is a fair bit," he said, while pointing out that in the context of their network as a whole, 15mbps is -only a small dribble".
Sourceforge are yet to announce the establishment of the mirror, the first in the Asia Pacific region. The group will announce the launch of the new site to their 400,000 or so e-mail subscribers next week.
ZDNet Australia was tipped to the mirror's presence by a local open-source aficionado, but McGovern says they welcome the media interest.
"We don't mind being scooped, we just want to get the word out," he said.
Flow use open source software extensively through their operations, so Horsington says that a big incentive for launching the mirror was speeding up internal downloads of Sourceforge content. They also believe the mirror will attract open source users and developers to their network through free downloads, but there's no direct financial benefit to Flow.
"There are no immediate financial benefits in this for us," he said.
There have been intangible benefits though, with their logo now getting in excess of 500,000 page-views a day on the Sourceforge site.
"The first day it went up we got a thousand click-throughs to our site," he said.
But the installation of the mirror will help Flow to negotiate peering relationships, Horsington said.
Getting the mirror put in at all did, however, represent a challenge for Sourceforge. McGovern says that one of the biggest hitches was the reluctance of Australian ISP's to stream a large amount of data to International sites.
