7 ms·

A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future

89 points by jontro 8y ago

zzzeek 8y ago
who even owns sourceforge now? it's like coming across an antique toy, who knows how many garage sales and antique stores it must have been living in over the decades - a quick google reminds me it's been at least owned by VA Software, Geeknet, Dice.com (!) and now apparently some company called BIZX. from a usability standpoint, including the release process, the mailing list, and everything else, the site was always of course awful, which wasn't so unreasonable in 2002 but as the years and owners went by it just got worse and worse. Along with the ads/malware, I took issue with it's silly practice that you could never delete a project from it, because that would somehow be denying the fact that you've promised your project is open source. Never mind this means if you wanted to move to some other platform that an ancient fossilized version of your code would stay on Sourceforge forever and confuse users who were unfortunate to find it there first.
- pvg 8y ago
  One of the principals posts about sourceforge occasionally: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=loganabbott https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=loganabbott There was an article about their (last?) acquisition a couple of years ago where they commented at some length. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11092219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11092219
- JoshMnem 8y ago
  > who even owns sourceforge now? http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/bizx-subsidiary-sourceforge-media-llc-acquires-slashdot-media-2091995.htm http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/bizx-subsidiary-sou... https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bizx https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bizx
owenversteeg 8y ago
While redesigning the site was undoubtedly a good step, it still feels a bit "off" to me, anyone else?
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  It feels like it was designed in 2001. I don't think anyone cares about "history" as much as they care about the fact that the brand is old and tired, and even looks it.
KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago
No compelling differentiation, literally just worse than all alternatives.
- jelly_dev 8y ago
  There's still a lot of tools that exist nowhere but sourceforge because they were abandoned by the developers years ago
codazoda 8y ago
Nah. Bridges burned.
- binarycrusader 8y ago
  New ownership — they didn’t burn the bridges but I agree that I think the name is too tainted now.
  - guntars 8y ago
    Did the new ownership fire every developer and middle manager? If not, that means there are folks at the “new” sourceforge that are perfectly happy bundling malware with OSS downloads. It was not addressed in the article at all so I’m not buying what they’re selling.
    - keypusher 8y ago
      They do mention removing bundled installers and implementing virus scans, both of which seem targeted at removing malware from the site.
      - drewbuschhorn 8y ago
        I think the issue was that people who thought that bundling malware was ok, are still employed there.
        rhabarba 8y ago
        Not necessarily with any responsibilities though.
        DuskStar 8y ago
        If you're employed somewhere, you have responsibilities. Otherwise what's the point?
ahmedalsudani 8y ago
History of SourceForge according to me: - forced users to look at ads and go through two steps in order to download projects - when that was not enough, injected malware into the files users were downloading - irrecoverably lost project information I don’t think they can do anything to salvage their image at this point. The last incident didn’t even inflict too much damage because there wasn’t much left to SourceForge.
- rhizome 8y ago
  Sometimes when things get broken, they're broken forever.
- lokedhs 8y ago
  Many years ago me and a friend wrote an open source game and we hosted the project on Sourceforge. This was some time in the late 90's. The project got dropped as so many others do because both of us found more interesting things to do. Now, if you were in this situation and you decided to come back to the old project a few years later (we're now in the early 2000's) wouldn't you expect to be able to continue where you left off? Not so with Sourceforge. I found that the entire project was deleted. I contacted them and got the answer that it was indeed deleted because it hadn't been touched in however many years it had been. To give credit where credit is due, they were actually able to recover my code from a backup and restore the project. The point of this post was just to point out that they've done some user hostile things for a very long time.
  - macspoofing 8y ago
    >Now, if you were in this situation and you decided to come back to the old project a few years later (we're now in the early 2000's) wouldn't you expect to be able to continue where you left off? That's unfair. Back then, storage was expensive, backups were expensive, bandwidth was expensive, server CPU time was expensive. You can't fault them for removing unsupported projects in an era when Microsoft and Yahoo were only giving you 10MB of email storage (you might get an extra 15MB for $10/mo) and similarly aggressive purge policies.
nathantotten 8y ago
> Comments disabled That pretty much says it all.
- rhabarba 8y ago
  SourceForge is controversial. I doubt they'd want to moderate the inevitable discussion. Nor would you.
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    If you want to rebuild trust, you need full free and frank dialogue.
mataug 8y ago
I wish them good luck and hope they can be a good competitor to gitlab and github. Some competition is always good. I do hope, as unlikely as it is, though that they move away from the Ad based revenue model. I personally, am not interested in returning to SourceForge due to all reasons articulated in other comments.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
edpichler 8y ago
This sentence: "We have the most robust search and discovery system of any open source repository on the web, and offer an unparalleled experience for end-users looking for software binaries they can download and install with the click of a button."
- saagarjha 8y ago
  What's wrong with it? GitHub's search isn't great, as I'm sure you're aware.
mmanfrin 8y ago
To me, this is just another website. There is no history, that was burned when it became an enormous cash grab. I understand they've been making a lot of changes, but if they want tabula rasa, then they have it -- and they have to offer something that entices people to use the product, not rely on the name they inherited.
- mifreewil 8y ago
  As someone else already pointed out, I don’t think they’ll be able to rely on the name as it’s been severely tarnished beyond repair. They’ll have to rely on something that is significantly better than what the GitHubs, Bitbuckets, and Gitlabs are offering.
rhabarba 8y ago
At least it does not belong to Microsoft yet. That seems to be important for some people. ;-) (I actually laughed when I saw that SourceForge has a GitHub importer now... SourceForge! Ha!) On a more serious note: SourceForge has surely improved a lot, including not shipping malware anymore. The only things that I'd improve are: 1) More reliable SVN servers. Yes, I "still" have SVN projects on SourceForge because I lack motivation to change either the VCS or the hoster. But SourceForge's servers sometimes don't like my attempts to pull from or push to them. I blame the server admins, not the VCS. 2) A better code view. Just like Bitbucket's, SourceForge's code view (especially for diffs) is a mess. That's the one big thing I always liked with GitHub: Reading and comparing commits is perfectly clean. 3) A better project page. It always takes me a while to find the "Code" link on those - although it's always in a similar place. Good luck, SourceForge.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
earenndil 8y ago
> We’ve already seen a huge surge in projects being imported to SourceForge from GitHub in the last few days I wonder why?
bachmeier 8y ago
If SF wants to attract developers, they should support alternative version control systems like fossil and darcs. I can't think of any reason to use SF for a new project except possibly that you use mercurial and don't like bitbucket. The market for git hosting is extremely competitive and they don't bring much to the table.
- rhabarba 8y ago
  They also have SVN. There are not many SVN hosters left. A good competitor for Darcshub would be appreciated though.
- gtirloni 8y ago
  That means a UI that has to take into account the idiosyncrasies of different tools. It seems like a recipe for disaster, if focus is what SF needs now.
  - rhabarba 8y ago
    It works for Bitbucket (Mercurial and Git, although they don't advertise Mercurial nearly as much as Git).
paulie_a 8y ago
Sourceforge is something I used extensively, they burned their reputation. I don't care about new management or new owners. I will never use their site again. When I find a package or library that is available only hosted there, I look for an alternative. That is how bad their reputation is.
- colejohnson66 8y ago
  What’s your FOSS alternative to FlightGear? MinGW? TortoiseSVN? PortableApps? Code::Blocks? 7Zip? QBittorrent? DeSmuME? WinSCP? XAMPP? Boost? The list goes on and on... These are all applications I’ve used that distribute through SourceForge. This isn’t a snarky comment; It’s a legitimate question. I use most of these programs a lot, and if SourceForge’s brand is so tainted, what is one to do? (Never using these programs is not an answer)
Lazare 8y ago
Personally, I feel that the SourceForge brand has negative value right now. For me they burnt almost all of their goodwill during their long, long period of neglect and stagnation, then went sharply negative when they started distributing malware. I'm willing to give the new team the benefit of the doubt; let's just assume they want to create a high quality product. That's great, but I think the first step is starting over with a non-tainted brand. It may make sense to migrate existing projects and accounts across, or even to build on top of the existing code base, just don't call it SourceForge.
- mifreewil 8y ago
  Completely agree. Sourceforge, the brand, is so tainted I can’t even read this on my phone, since a content blocker List I have installed has apparently blocked the entire domain. The brand has been shit in my own mind for a while. Not even going to bother reading this. Why does it still exist? Replaced by GitHub, Bitbucket, and Gitlab.
  - senozhatsky 8y ago
    > Why does it still exist? Well, we are using Sourceforge... For one particular reason - free mailing list [for our open source project]. The code is on GitHub, but we want to do things the "old way" - send a patch to the mailing list, let people review it. -ss
  - DougMerritt 8y ago
    There's still old source code on Sourceforge that hasn't been moved elsewhere. Some of that is 100% stagnant, some of that is lightly maintained with a bug fix once every few years, and a little of it is somewhat actively maintained. I always thought that Freshmeat, while not a hosting site and therefore not comparable, was an ok brand, and didn't necessarily have to go inactive, even though, yes, it couldn't keep up with everything. It could've continued to play some interesting role.
    - laumars 8y ago
      Since the FileZilla fiasco I don't trust projects on Sourceforge any longer either as I cannot tell which projects are complicit in distributing malware and which use Sourceforge as an innocent software repository.
Proven 8y ago
I hope they crash and burn, so that 2-3 projects that I still use and that are stuck here move to Github.
bingchenasian 8y ago
Too late for a future - I suggest a rebrand.
nbabitskiy 8y ago
If you "browse projects" on their website, they offer you categories, like ERM, CRM, HR, Ecommerce, Accounting. They just don't work developers, they work for (unsuspecting) ERM software users, in capacity of an open-source app store. That's why it can succeed - if one makes a CRM software, he might mirror there in hope to be stumbled upon by category browsers. edit: some grammar
vineet 8y ago
I love the guy challenging the big companies and so want them to succeed. But, when I look at their site I wonder about so many things: - What do VoIP and Internet Speed Test have to do with what they do. - I wish they have a business model that is not selling ads or my personal information to others. As long as they do that, it is hard to trust them, especially with their malware past. - Who are their target users, is it me (a developer) or someone else? - Why do they equate free to open source. Free means so much more in for developers. I use open source despite it being free to use, but because I know I can use it in interesting ways if I need to.
chrismorgan 8y ago
Recent history of SourceForge: they migrate data centres, and some things got broken and went missing for several months, and in one of the two cases I’ve checked ended up just disappearing completely, though that could be the project’s decision (specifically, when audacity.sourceforge.net started working again, it didn’t actually, because links that used to work just redirect to the project page).
deevolution 8y ago
I dont see any reason for this to still exist now that git is a thing... all github would have to do is make their release pages a bit more friendly to non devs and it would demolish sourceforge completely.
- askmike 8y ago
  I don't think developers would ever pick SF because of how user friendly the release page looks.
fuball63 8y ago
I've used SourceForge for a while for my hobbyist game development. I've never had a problem with them product wise; their tools work well and they're really making solid progress on the redesign. The malware incident was really bad, but I'm surprised more people won't give them a look given the fact it is new ownership and a much smaller team. What's strange, to me, is that last week there was a thread with a majority of commenters defending Microsoft and their new attitude towards open source, when Microsoft has been making terrible products whilst being hostile to developers and consumers alike for decades (just my opinion). Everyone has different grudges for different reasons, I guess. It's a tough and complex problem as a business.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  Well, the UI still sucks. They still have their weird download mirror page that reminds me of filesharing sites like RapidShare and Megaupload. So there's that. It doesn't exactly engender trust.
- alkonaut 8y ago
  > defending Microsoft and their new attitude towards open source What’s odd about that? Isn’t their new attitude better than the old, and perhaps “good enough” (at least compared to other giants)? Are you saying nothing they do should be considered good enough by devs, based on the previous history?
  - fuball63 8y ago
    Personally, I'm a big believer in second chances in any facet of life, but people seem to act the way you're describing to Sourceforge, despite giving a pass to other entities. It's all a matter of personal perspective.
    - alkonaut 8y ago
      I can see the point of both views but I do think the behavior of sf was worse than that of ms (in the case of sf it was a criminal breach of trust). In any case it does seem like a double standard to not accept the “new people, new philosophy, new chance” in either both or neither case.
dqpb 8y ago
Sourceforge is one of the sketchiest/spammiest looking sites I've ever been to.
mattl 8y ago
Sourceforge was briefly free software, proprietary, unpopular and then now kinda-free but nobody trusts them.
- loganabbott 8y ago
  Huh? Still completely free
  - mattl 8y ago
    It might be free now, but I believe there are some non-free parts. For a long time it was proprietary.
    - loganabbott 8y ago
      Nope it's still free and has always been free. And it's built on Apache Allura which is open source.
      - mattl 8y ago
        There were years when it wasn’t free and there was a proprietary enterprise edition sold for on-premises usage.
emacsen 8y ago
In the late 90s, I was part of a project, which later became a non-profit called Tux.org, who was trying to be an umbrella organization to help Linux related FLOSS projects. We weren't quite at the model of a fiscal sponsor, but Tux had mirrors of projects and the goal of helping others. Then Sourceforge came out and I remember as a 20 year old trying to talk with them about where they saw themselves in the community, and they were basically dismissive of the work that we were doing. Nonetheless, they had (at the time) flashy software that made them attractive and many projects used them. They were genuinely the Github of their day. The ultimate lesson of Sourceforge is three fold for me: 1. Never trust a commercial entity that you aren't paying to be your single repository This applies to Sourceforge and Github, ultimately. 2. Never use proprietary software as your core Sourceforge, like Github, was proprietary and used that to keep people in. Like Github, the interface to the internals were FLOSS (Subversion in SF's case, git in Github's case). 2. We need better verification/validation methods to handle malware We need verified builds
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
privateSFacct 8y ago
Real networks Sourceforge - Companies that torched their reputation by treating users like s#^t. Straight malware. Seriously, they would have been better off going quiet and then building back up later / selling a higher quality brand. Developers are valuable to the big players - why drive them away with malware - seems like the malware was targeting wrong market. And yes, I was part of friends and family IPO at SF.
n2dasun 8y ago
One of the guys who started SF taught me about Linux :)
- rhabarba 8y ago
  Is that a good thing?
loganabbott 8y ago
Hi, president of SourceForge here. Glad this is trending, albeit a few months later. These articles seem to trend on HN every few months, with many people not realizing SourceForge changed ownership in 2016 and that the new team's been working hard on improving. To be clear, we had nothing to do with the bundled adware decisions of 2015, and when we took over in 2016, the first thing we did was remove the bundled adware, as well as institute malware scans for every project on the site. We're working hard to restore trust, so if we win some of you back that would be cool. However, we're just focused on doing right by our million daily users.

89 points by jontro 8y ago

who even owns sourceforge now? it's like coming across an antique toy, who knows how many garage sales and antique stores it must have been living in over the decades - a quick google reminds me it's been at least owned by VA Software, Geeknet, Dice.com (!) and now apparently some company called BIZX. from a usability standpoint, including the release process, the mailing list, and everything else, the site was always of course awful, which wasn't so unreasonable in 2002 but as the years and owners went by it just got worse and worse. Along with the ads/malware, I took issue with it's silly practice that you could never delete a project from it, because that would somehow be denying the fact that you've promised your project is open source. Never mind this means if you wanted to move to some other platform that an ancient fossilized version of your code would stay on Sourceforge forever and confuse users who were unfortunate to find it there first.

pvg 8y ago
One of the principals posts about sourceforge occasionally: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=loganabbott https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=loganabbott There was an article about their (last?) acquisition a couple of years ago where they commented at some length. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11092219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11092219
JoshMnem 8y ago
> who even owns sourceforge now? http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/bizx-subsidiary-sourceforge-media-llc-acquires-slashdot-media-2091995.htm http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/bizx-subsidiary-sou... https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bizx https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/bizx

owenversteeg 8y ago

While redesigning the site was undoubtedly a good step, it still feels a bit "off" to me, anyone else?

peterwwillis 8y ago
It feels like it was designed in 2001. I don't think anyone cares about "history" as much as they care about the fact that the brand is old and tired, and even looks it.

KaoruAoiShiho 8y ago

No compelling differentiation, literally just worse than all alternatives.

jelly_dev 8y ago
There's still a lot of tools that exist nowhere but sourceforge because they were abandoned by the developers years ago

codazoda 8y ago

Nah. Bridges burned.

binarycrusader 8y ago
New ownership — they didn’t burn the bridges but I agree that I think the name is too tainted now.
- guntars 8y ago
  Did the new ownership fire every developer and middle manager? If not, that means there are folks at the “new” sourceforge that are perfectly happy bundling malware with OSS downloads. It was not addressed in the article at all so I’m not buying what they’re selling.
  - keypusher 8y ago
    They do mention removing bundled installers and implementing virus scans, both of which seem targeted at removing malware from the site.
    - drewbuschhorn 8y ago
      I think the issue was that people who thought that bundling malware was ok, are still employed there.
      - rhabarba 8y ago
        Not necessarily with any responsibilities though.
        DuskStar 8y ago
        If you're employed somewhere, you have responsibilities. Otherwise what's the point?

ahmedalsudani 8y ago

History of SourceForge according to me: - forced users to look at ads and go through two steps in order to download projects - when that was not enough, injected malware into the files users were downloading - irrecoverably lost project information I don’t think they can do anything to salvage their image at this point. The last incident didn’t even inflict too much damage because there wasn’t much left to SourceForge.

rhizome 8y ago
Sometimes when things get broken, they're broken forever.
lokedhs 8y ago
Many years ago me and a friend wrote an open source game and we hosted the project on Sourceforge. This was some time in the late 90's. The project got dropped as so many others do because both of us found more interesting things to do. Now, if you were in this situation and you decided to come back to the old project a few years later (we're now in the early 2000's) wouldn't you expect to be able to continue where you left off? Not so with Sourceforge. I found that the entire project was deleted. I contacted them and got the answer that it was indeed deleted because it hadn't been touched in however many years it had been. To give credit where credit is due, they were actually able to recover my code from a backup and restore the project. The point of this post was just to point out that they've done some user hostile things for a very long time.
- macspoofing 8y ago
  >Now, if you were in this situation and you decided to come back to the old project a few years later (we're now in the early 2000's) wouldn't you expect to be able to continue where you left off? That's unfair. Back then, storage was expensive, backups were expensive, bandwidth was expensive, server CPU time was expensive. You can't fault them for removing unsupported projects in an era when Microsoft and Yahoo were only giving you 10MB of email storage (you might get an extra 15MB for $10/mo) and similarly aggressive purge policies.

nathantotten 8y ago

> Comments disabled That pretty much says it all.

rhabarba 8y ago
SourceForge is controversial. I doubt they'd want to moderate the inevitable discussion. Nor would you.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  If you want to rebuild trust, you need full free and frank dialogue.

mataug 8y ago

I wish them good luck and hope they can be a good competitor to gitlab and github. Some competition is always good. I do hope, as unlikely as it is, though that they move away from the Ad based revenue model. I personally, am not interested in returning to SourceForge due to all reasons articulated in other comments.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

edpichler 8y ago

This sentence: "We have the most robust search and discovery system of any open source repository on the web, and offer an unparalleled experience for end-users looking for software binaries they can download and install with the click of a button."

saagarjha 8y ago
What's wrong with it? GitHub's search isn't great, as I'm sure you're aware.

mmanfrin 8y ago

To me, this is just another website. There is no history, that was burned when it became an enormous cash grab. I understand they've been making a lot of changes, but if they want tabula rasa, then they have it -- and they have to offer something that entices people to use the product, not rely on the name they inherited.

mifreewil 8y ago
As someone else already pointed out, I don’t think they’ll be able to rely on the name as it’s been severely tarnished beyond repair. They’ll have to rely on something that is significantly better than what the GitHubs, Bitbuckets, and Gitlabs are offering.

rhabarba 8y ago

At least it does not belong to Microsoft yet. That seems to be important for some people. ;-) (I actually laughed when I saw that SourceForge has a GitHub importer now... SourceForge! Ha!) On a more serious note: SourceForge has surely improved a lot, including not shipping malware anymore. The only things that I'd improve are: 1) More reliable SVN servers. Yes, I "still" have SVN projects on SourceForge because I lack motivation to change either the VCS or the hoster. But SourceForge's servers sometimes don't like my attempts to pull from or push to them. I blame the server admins, not the VCS. 2) A better code view. Just like Bitbucket's, SourceForge's code view (especially for diffs) is a mess. That's the one big thing I always liked with GitHub: Reading and comparing commits is perfectly clean. 3) A better project page. It always takes me a while to find the "Code" link on those - although it's always in a similar place. Good luck, SourceForge.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

earenndil 8y ago

> We’ve already seen a huge surge in projects being imported to SourceForge from GitHub in the last few days I wonder why?

bachmeier 8y ago

If SF wants to attract developers, they should support alternative version control systems like fossil and darcs. I can't think of any reason to use SF for a new project except possibly that you use mercurial and don't like bitbucket. The market for git hosting is extremely competitive and they don't bring much to the table.

rhabarba 8y ago
They also have SVN. There are not many SVN hosters left. A good competitor for Darcshub would be appreciated though.
gtirloni 8y ago
That means a UI that has to take into account the idiosyncrasies of different tools. It seems like a recipe for disaster, if focus is what SF needs now.
- rhabarba 8y ago
  It works for Bitbucket (Mercurial and Git, although they don't advertise Mercurial nearly as much as Git).

paulie_a 8y ago

Sourceforge is something I used extensively, they burned their reputation. I don't care about new management or new owners. I will never use their site again. When I find a package or library that is available only hosted there, I look for an alternative. That is how bad their reputation is.

colejohnson66 8y ago
What’s your FOSS alternative to FlightGear? MinGW? TortoiseSVN? PortableApps? Code::Blocks? 7Zip? QBittorrent? DeSmuME? WinSCP? XAMPP? Boost? The list goes on and on... These are all applications I’ve used that distribute through SourceForge. This isn’t a snarky comment; It’s a legitimate question. I use most of these programs a lot, and if SourceForge’s brand is so tainted, what is one to do? (Never using these programs is not an answer)

Lazare 8y ago

Personally, I feel that the SourceForge brand has negative value right now. For me they burnt almost all of their goodwill during their long, long period of neglect and stagnation, then went sharply negative when they started distributing malware. I'm willing to give the new team the benefit of the doubt; let's just assume they want to create a high quality product. That's great, but I think the first step is starting over with a non-tainted brand. It may make sense to migrate existing projects and accounts across, or even to build on top of the existing code base, just don't call it SourceForge.

mifreewil 8y ago
Completely agree. Sourceforge, the brand, is so tainted I can’t even read this on my phone, since a content blocker List I have installed has apparently blocked the entire domain. The brand has been shit in my own mind for a while. Not even going to bother reading this. Why does it still exist? Replaced by GitHub, Bitbucket, and Gitlab.
- senozhatsky 8y ago
  > Why does it still exist? Well, we are using Sourceforge... For one particular reason - free mailing list [for our open source project]. The code is on GitHub, but we want to do things the "old way" - send a patch to the mailing list, let people review it. -ss
- DougMerritt 8y ago
  There's still old source code on Sourceforge that hasn't been moved elsewhere. Some of that is 100% stagnant, some of that is lightly maintained with a bug fix once every few years, and a little of it is somewhat actively maintained. I always thought that Freshmeat, while not a hosting site and therefore not comparable, was an ok brand, and didn't necessarily have to go inactive, even though, yes, it couldn't keep up with everything. It could've continued to play some interesting role.
  - laumars 8y ago
    Since the FileZilla fiasco I don't trust projects on Sourceforge any longer either as I cannot tell which projects are complicit in distributing malware and which use Sourceforge as an innocent software repository.

Proven 8y ago

I hope they crash and burn, so that 2-3 projects that I still use and that are stuck here move to Github.

bingchenasian 8y ago

Too late for a future - I suggest a rebrand.

nbabitskiy 8y ago

If you "browse projects" on their website, they offer you categories, like ERM, CRM, HR, Ecommerce, Accounting. They just don't work developers, they work for (unsuspecting) ERM software users, in capacity of an open-source app store. That's why it can succeed - if one makes a CRM software, he might mirror there in hope to be stumbled upon by category browsers. edit: some grammar

vineet 8y ago

I love the guy challenging the big companies and so want them to succeed. But, when I look at their site I wonder about so many things: - What do VoIP and Internet Speed Test have to do with what they do. - I wish they have a business model that is not selling ads or my personal information to others. As long as they do that, it is hard to trust them, especially with their malware past. - Who are their target users, is it me (a developer) or someone else? - Why do they equate free to open source. Free means so much more in for developers. I use open source despite it being free to use, but because I know I can use it in interesting ways if I need to.

chrismorgan 8y ago

Recent history of SourceForge: they migrate data centres, and some things got broken and went missing for several months, and in one of the two cases I’ve checked ended up just disappearing completely, though that could be the project’s decision (specifically, when audacity.sourceforge.net started working again, it didn’t actually, because links that used to work just redirect to the project page).

deevolution 8y ago

I dont see any reason for this to still exist now that git is a thing... all github would have to do is make their release pages a bit more friendly to non devs and it would demolish sourceforge completely.

askmike 8y ago
I don't think developers would ever pick SF because of how user friendly the release page looks.

fuball63 8y ago

I've used SourceForge for a while for my hobbyist game development. I've never had a problem with them product wise; their tools work well and they're really making solid progress on the redesign. The malware incident was really bad, but I'm surprised more people won't give them a look given the fact it is new ownership and a much smaller team. What's strange, to me, is that last week there was a thread with a majority of commenters defending Microsoft and their new attitude towards open source, when Microsoft has been making terrible products whilst being hostile to developers and consumers alike for decades (just my opinion). Everyone has different grudges for different reasons, I guess. It's a tough and complex problem as a business.

nerdponx 8y ago
Well, the UI still sucks. They still have their weird download mirror page that reminds me of filesharing sites like RapidShare and Megaupload. So there's that. It doesn't exactly engender trust.
alkonaut 8y ago
> defending Microsoft and their new attitude towards open source What’s odd about that? Isn’t their new attitude better than the old, and perhaps “good enough” (at least compared to other giants)? Are you saying nothing they do should be considered good enough by devs, based on the previous history?
- fuball63 8y ago
  Personally, I'm a big believer in second chances in any facet of life, but people seem to act the way you're describing to Sourceforge, despite giving a pass to other entities. It's all a matter of personal perspective.
  - alkonaut 8y ago
    I can see the point of both views but I do think the behavior of sf was worse than that of ms (in the case of sf it was a criminal breach of trust). In any case it does seem like a double standard to not accept the “new people, new philosophy, new chance” in either both or neither case.

dqpb 8y ago

Sourceforge is one of the sketchiest/spammiest looking sites I've ever been to.

mattl 8y ago

Sourceforge was briefly free software, proprietary, unpopular and then now kinda-free but nobody trusts them.

loganabbott 8y ago
Huh? Still completely free
- mattl 8y ago
  It might be free now, but I believe there are some non-free parts. For a long time it was proprietary.
  - loganabbott 8y ago
    Nope it's still free and has always been free. And it's built on Apache Allura which is open source.
    - mattl 8y ago
      There were years when it wasn’t free and there was a proprietary enterprise edition sold for on-premises usage.

emacsen 8y ago

In the late 90s, I was part of a project, which later became a non-profit called Tux.org, who was trying to be an umbrella organization to help Linux related FLOSS projects. We weren't quite at the model of a fiscal sponsor, but Tux had mirrors of projects and the goal of helping others. Then Sourceforge came out and I remember as a 20 year old trying to talk with them about where they saw themselves in the community, and they were basically dismissive of the work that we were doing. Nonetheless, they had (at the time) flashy software that made them attractive and many projects used them. They were genuinely the Github of their day. The ultimate lesson of Sourceforge is three fold for me: 1. Never trust a commercial entity that you aren't paying to be your single repository This applies to Sourceforge and Github, ultimately. 2. Never use proprietary software as your core Sourceforge, like Github, was proprietary and used that to keep people in. Like Github, the interface to the internals were FLOSS (Subversion in SF's case, git in Github's case). 2. We need better verification/validation methods to handle malware We need verified builds

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

privateSFacct 8y ago

Real networks Sourceforge - Companies that torched their reputation by treating users like s#^t. Straight malware. Seriously, they would have been better off going quiet and then building back up later / selling a higher quality brand. Developers are valuable to the big players - why drive them away with malware - seems like the malware was targeting wrong market. And yes, I was part of friends and family IPO at SF.

n2dasun 8y ago

One of the guys who started SF taught me about Linux :)

rhabarba 8y ago
Is that a good thing?

loganabbott 8y ago

Hi, president of SourceForge here. Glad this is trending, albeit a few months later. These articles seem to trend on HN every few months, with many people not realizing SourceForge changed ownership in 2016 and that the new team's been working hard on improving. To be clear, we had nothing to do with the bundled adware decisions of 2015, and when we took over in 2016, the first thing we did was remove the bundled adware, as well as institute malware scans for every project on the site. We're working hard to restore trust, so if we win some of you back that would be cool. However, we're just focused on doing right by our million daily users.