10 ms·
SourceForge and Slashdot Have Been Sold
- socceroos 11y agoSlashdot was a big part of my early years in the tech industry. It had it's own cultural quirks, but overall was a great place to get general 'news for nerds'. I still visit every so often as it gives a slightly different angle on the industry to HN. Much like lxer.com.
- vermontdevil 11y agoLoved that site until the past few years with the UI changes. Will never forget CmdrTaco review of iPod.
- sixdimensional 11y agoI for one welcome our new corporate overlords! f1rst p0st! How about a Beowulf cluster of those?? Ah, the good old days... :)
- FigBug 11y agoNatalie Portman, naked and petrified and covered in hot grits
- cjp 11y agoAll your base! Those were some good times.
- nailer 11y agoConstantly referring to 'M$FT' to be edgy. Good times. Seriously though 2016 will be the year of the Linux desktop.
- meric 11y agoIf you think about it, the year of the Linux mobile has happened already.
- nailer 11y agoI guess that was the point: everyone was trying to conquer the desktop when the desktop was already giving way to a more dominant form of computing. But hey, the Linux kernel and Konqueror basically won consumers in the end.
- frik 11y agoThe Borg icon of Bill. And the /. pony logo. And the 9/11 live coverage on Slashdot, when every other news site was down, Slashdot was up and running: http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-towers-and-pentagon-attacked http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-tower... and http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1842258/our-new-pearl-harbor http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1842258/our-new-pearl-har... Ah, fond memories.
- rtee334 11y agoCareful, you can't says those things nowadays
- KineticLensman 11y agoYou should have put it like this... "Careful, In Soviet Amerika, interweb censors you"
- filoeleven 11y agoMy favorite Slashdot comment was attached to a story about discovering spycams in Russia. I don't remember the particulars of the story, but the entirely apropos comment was, "In Soviet Russia, ducts tape you!"
- JoshTriplett 11y agoBSD is dying. Netcraft confirms it. Slashdot is also where I first saw http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt posted. Anyone remember seeing the occasional "(Score: 5, Troll)" comment, which only happened when a comment got downvoted as "Troll" and then upvoted as "Underrated" (which didn't change the "tag")?
- cperciva 11y agoAnyone remember seeing the occasional "(Score: 5, Troll)" comment, which only happened when a comment got downvoted as "Troll" and then upvoted as "Underrated" (which didn't change the "tag")? I had a few of those. I was more proud of my "(Score: -1, Insightful)" though.
- lmm 11y agoBest I ever managed was a +4, Flamebait.
- adekok 11y agoHaving been involved in the anti-spam thing for a while, I can simplify the "spam solutions" checklist to two items: 1) Do you have a solution to one piece of the spam problem? ( ) Yes - go away, you don't solve the whole spam problem. ( ) No - go away, you're not helping to solve the spam problem 2) Do you have a solution to the whole spam problem? ( ) Yes - go away, you're a FUSTTSP scammer ( ) No - go away, you're not helping to solve the spam problem. The explicit approach by the SMTP people was both of the above at the same time. Incremental solutions were derided as "the spammers will just try something else". Major fixes to SMTP were derided as "it takes a decade to deploy a new protocol". Well, it's been a decade since I was involved. Changes to SMTP practices mean that I've got jump through more hoops to prove my worthiness when I send email. But the amount of spam I'm getting hasn't gone down.
- JoshTriplett 11y agoSearching turns up zero results for "FUSTTSP" apart from your comment. Can you elaborate?
- wslh 11y agoI was a reader too but really hated their pedantic attitude: difficulty for passing their filter to post a news, and the owners not modifying a post when you pointed to an inaccurate news item (e.g: claiming that a security bug was discovered by someone else).
- abrookewood 11y agoIt was a big part of my news in the past too. But I started hating the attitude and snarkiness that overtook the site. People lost the art of discussing and debating things and instead focussed on too-often repeated memes and abuse. Honestly, I fond Hacker News and never went back. I actually think I had forgotten it even existed until this post. As for SourceForge ... good riddance to that malware infested cesspit.
- sageabilly 11y agoI used to go to SlashDot, in the same way that I come to HN now- for good tech-related news that I couldn't find anywhere else. The comments used to spawn great swaths of related research but now I might as well go to 4chan. Fortunately HN is still awesome and the comments always add to a discussion.
- frik 11y agoMe too. Slashdot's comment system was a bit more advanced. Slashdot's downwind came from Digg, Reddit and HN. Though the insightful comments switched directly from Slashdot to HN. And HN is changing too, less startup news, bubble fears, more general public audience, more corporate spam (and voting rings, sock puppets) - though it's still a very great community and I hope it remains like that for several more years. A tech news site is great because of the comments and the news selection - and the HN algorithms work usually great.
- Shivetya 11y agoEarly on they were a great site, then they let politics take over, either directly or indirect. The indirect story method happens here too, a moderately technology oriented or business oriented title but an article usually bashing one side of the political spectrum. /. screwed up because they let their bias be known and moderation was obviously affected. Don't miss the site for it became, do miss it for what it was.
- pferde 11y agosoylentnews.org has became quite good in the short time they are alive.
- ars 11y agoI wish them every success. I used to use both sites extensively. I still have accounts on both (and a "coveted" 5 digit user ID on slashdot), but I rarely go there these days. Maybe they'll turn things around.
- stcredzero 11y agoHas any website returned to its former glory, ever?
- PlzSnow 11y agoGood question, and I'm curious to see if anyone can provide an example.
- lmm 11y agoNot websites I know, but AOL instant messenger is really good these days. Gnutella is actually pretty alright. There was a brief cultural moment a few months ago in Shoreditch when some hipsters started using myspace again, but that seems to have petered out. I've heard it claimed that MetaFilter went through a bad patch and then recovered - not involved enough to know anything more about that though.
- dhoe 11y agoI have a sub-20k user ID. I use it to remind myself that reading stuff on the web doesn't make you rich.
- SixSigma 11y agoNeither did owning Slashdot via VA Linux, just ask Eric Raymond about the ups (I am now ... absurdly rich). [1] and downs [2] (Nope. Didn’t sell before the bust.) [1] http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/1999121000105NWLF http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/1999121000105NWLF [2] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=556#comment-228165 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=556#comment-228165
- lmm 11y agoI imagine a sub-20k account would go for a certain amount of money.
- kiba 11y agoThey have been sold....how many times now?
- jonathankoren 11y agoThree times. 1st) Blockstackers Intergalactic (Slashdot's original parent) sold to Andover.net. Andover.net got bought by VA Linux. VA Linux changes it's name to Geeknet. 2nd) Geeknet sells sells Slashdot and Sourceforge to Dice. 3rd)Dice sells it to these guys.
- pbhjpbhj 11y agoSo 6 [sets of] owners. When Andover bought VA Linux one of the assets they bought was /., so that should count as a sale.
- ngtszman 11y agothat's the old day when open source is a new things to MSFT / Apple.
- a_e_k 11y agoSounds like this can only be good for SourceForge after the previous scuzziness: > "When I say trusted – I mean trusted," he went on. "We disagree with some of the previous monetization strategies from an industry and business perspective, and have immediate plans to discontinue programs inconsistent with our being a trusted and reliable resource for the entire open source community. I wish them luck. I'm not thrilled by the GitHub monoculture.
- gosub 11y agoat least a github exodus is just a git clone away
- zitterbewegung 11y agoNo it's not if you want to have feature parity.
- scrollaway 11y agoEssentially it is, though: http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/importing/import_projects_from_github.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/importing/import_projects_...
- InclinedPlane 11y agoThis is like saying that rsync and dropbox are the same thing. A github exodus is certainly possible, and it's great that github doesn't have a ton of tight lock-in (though it has some) via proprietary crap, but it's still a lot of work to leave github.
- mikeash 11y agoIncidentally, have you seen the original Dropbox post on HN? The second top comment is all about how it's pointless because you can "trivially" build the same thing yourself with FTP and other assorted software.
- 11y ago
- mixologic 11y ago> "Indeed, he promised to return SourceForge to its glory days, not only by undoing the harm that’s been done, but by bringing rapid development and much needed improvements to the site’s infrastructure." I sure hope that means downloading projects from sourceforge can happen on a modern timescale. I have more bandwidth in my bedroom than their infrastructure.
- lgas 11y agoIn all fairness, you don't have to move the amount of malware through your bedroom that SourceForge moves through their network.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- kriro 11y agoI haven't been on /. forever but I think a strategy focused more around gossipy/soapy topics and embracing the long tail of your (stereo)typical IT worker (tech gadgets, scify, comics etc.) would be decent. HN covers the "techy" and "startupy" segments fairly well. I have no idea how SourceForge will turn out. In my mind it's tarnished forever due to the crapware shenanigans. They have some "community building" features that seem valuable, used to have a decent brand name and it's never bad to have an extra place for storing FLOSS.
- yitchelle 11y agoSo true for SourceForge. There are lots and lots of lesson learned items in there for folks at Github and friends. Please take note and make better!
- blakesterz 11y agoI still wish Malda and the other guys writing the Slashcode would've realized that the future was not in blogging/advertising but in making Slashcode great. They had a good start on building something just like Drupal and a big head start but they never saw that as a business. (not like I saw it either, sadly)
- mratzloff 11y agoWhy on earth would anyone buy SourceForge? It's a money pit.
- frik 11y agoSourceforge doesn't host binary downloads themselves. Big free mirrors like HEAnet host the files.
- homarp 11y agoI recommend http://alterslash.org/ http://alterslash.org/ as a "real time" best of of what's on slashdot.
- aikah 11y agoSourceForge could have been a wonderfull thing, especially when it comes to serving binaries from OSS. They destroyed their reputation with them bundling software will malware or hijacking projects... They could have opened their infrastructure to commercial orgs for instance, to build then deliver software ... No, they had to go the cheapest route and violate their core user's trust.
- JohnTHaller 11y agoAs part of the nostalgia, I present my favorite Slashdot April Fool's design scheme, "OMG!!! Ponies!!!": http://i.imgur.com/7tmqgN9.jpg http://i.imgur.com/7tmqgN9.jpg
- frik 11y agoThe previous owner was pretty stupid. The Slashdot "Beta" was almost as catastrophic as the Digg.com fiasco. Well good that Beta vanished, good for Slashdot. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/slashdots-new-interface-could-kill-what-keeps-slashdot-relevant/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/slashd...
- davidgerard 11y ago"Users have been contacted and reassured, both of them."
- yuhong 11y agoSlashdot thread: http://meta.slashdot.org/story/16/01/29/0247219/slashdot-and-sourceforge-sold-now-under-new-management http://meta.slashdot.org/story/16/01/29/0247219/slashdot-and...