4 ms·

I don't believe there will ever be a clear "winner" because the landscape is constantly changing. Sourceforge was THE place to store your OSS code and provide d

by MikeW 16y ago

I don't believe there will ever be a clear "winner" because the landscape is constantly changing. Sourceforge was THE place to store your OSS code and provide downloads and there was a really great broad selection of code and a way to discover it. But they didn't build good ways of managing it and the whole experience became cluttered and confusing. I saw many projects move to Google Code who provided a clean interface. And now I see many of those projects move to github and everyone I know is a big fan of the forking and pull requests. But the landscape will change again and github keeps needing to iterate and innovate on their product. Just about every time I use github, I curse their disastrous search. There is just so much innovation they could develop around code management which they don't have, a competitor could jump in and they too could become the darling of the development world. They too will have "won".

sdesol 16y ago
When I started developing my product two years ago, I seriously thought about throwing my product into the source code hosting ring. I knew I had a product that could compete but as you pointed out, the landscape is constantly changing and it is also one of the places where you have compete by price. Look at the recent shift by Bitbucket after being purchased by Atlassian. Bitbucket can now afford to be a money pit so that Mercurial can gain further adoption. Atlassian is really trying to build an enterprise solution around Mercurial (they've said this publicly) so they don't care if they lose money with Bitbucket. And this is going to affect Github. Only time will tell how much of an impact this is going to have. So yeah I'm glad I decided I didn't want to get into this market space. I decided I was better off focusing on developing the innovations and be a complimentary asset for sites like Github, Bitbucket, and other hosting sites instead. My product certainly has overlap with some of the things that Github and Bitbucket has, but it's not designed to be a hosting solution. It's more of a competitor for Atlassians Fisheye and Fogcreeks kiln. If you are curious you can see a bit of my tool in action at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfEDwirFO1s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfEDwirFO1s Sorry it has no sound so it might not make any sense.

by MikeW 16y ago

sdesol 16y ago

When I started developing my product two years ago, I seriously thought about throwing my product into the source code hosting ring. I knew I had a product that could compete but as you pointed out, the landscape is constantly changing and it is also one of the places where you have compete by price. Look at the recent shift by Bitbucket after being purchased by Atlassian. Bitbucket can now afford to be a money pit so that Mercurial can gain further adoption. Atlassian is really trying to build an enterprise solution around Mercurial (they've said this publicly) so they don't care if they lose money with Bitbucket. And this is going to affect Github. Only time will tell how much of an impact this is going to have. So yeah I'm glad I decided I didn't want to get into this market space. I decided I was better off focusing on developing the innovations and be a complimentary asset for sites like Github, Bitbucket, and other hosting sites instead. My product certainly has overlap with some of the things that Github and Bitbucket has, but it's not designed to be a hosting solution. It's more of a competitor for Atlassians Fisheye and Fogcreeks kiln. If you are curious you can see a bit of my tool in action at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfEDwirFO1s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfEDwirFO1s Sorry it has no sound so it might not make any sense.