7 ms·

After skim reading I couldn't see it mentioned, but when SourceForge started bundling malware[0][1] into the software they hosted, it was their death toll. [0]

• fulafel 3y ago
  Also lots of people were using other VCSes like Mercurial and SVN. Representative of the times is eg this blog post about Mercurial on Google Code http://blog.dreasgrech.com/2010/07/managing-google-code-project-with.html http://blog.dreasgrech.com/2010/07/managing-google-code-proj... (Well, lots of people still are, but Git usage grew quite fast)
• asabla 3y ago
  This is how I remembered it as well. Kind of preferred Google Code over GitHub for a while. Or at least until it had enough functionality and/or tools to support it. Almost feels like it's time again for a shift...but it will probably be a while
  • 3seashells 3y ago
    We are in that phase we're non ms incompatible features will be added to mgit and the flesh eating plant slowly closes shut.
  • a_random_canuck 3y ago
    Honestly it’s been time for a shift ever since they were bought by Microsoft…
    • ladzoppelin 3y ago
      Yeah doesn't something this important need lots of money and accountability behind it so if sh@t hits the fan, its their burden and not an underfunded team. Like look at the XZ thing, things can get really serious really quick. I am not saying its a perfect situation but Github actions and the enterprise features are actually really good and I don't understand how any team smaller than the big 3 could handle the amount of data/users/traffic/importance that Github has become. Just an opinion ..
  • robertlagrant 3y ago
    It would be good if they gitlab and gitea standardised some features such as how to track issues in a repo, to make a baseline of portability available. Then they can say migrate to one of us from GitHub using this special tool, and then you'll have a nice portable repo from then on. That might help a little with the transition, ready for when MS does one of their crazy moves and people suddenly want to switch.
• baryphonic 3y ago
  Yep, that's when I quit downloading from SourceForge as well
• samtho 3y ago
  This was so mind-boggling even at the time that SourceForge thought it could leverage its market position to force adware and other nonsense upon its users and get away with it, which itself the last straw in a string of other abuses they subjected users to on the website. It is also so arrogant and presumptive to think that the developers, who's projects were hosted here, would put up with their distribution platform bundling junk with their software. This was a mortal sin for them, and rightfully so, whereby it became impossible to recover the damage to their reputation. Like, what were they thinking? Did they know they were doomed and just wanted one final ad sale? It’s just an egregious abuse of whatever dwindling power they had which permanently destroyed what little trust that the developers had for them - the same group of people that provided the only real value (for free, even) that SourceForge held.
  • sc68cal 3y ago
    Most likely management wanted more monetization and didn't listen to anyone who pushed back and said that bundling adware was a bad idea.
  • cced 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • justinclift 3y ago
    > This was so mind-boggling even at the time that SourceForge thought ... They'd been recently bought by a shitty company called DICE that also owned ummm... CNet or Download.com, or some other similar place with lots of downloads for Windows users: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice.com * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Adware_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Adware_controversy That company already served ~malware~ sorry "bundled third party offers" with their windows downloads, and figured they'd be able to copy-n-paste that approach to popular OSS downloads. That's not how it played out however, as some of us actually give a shit about things like that. ;)
    • akira2501 3y ago
      It was a funny and gross moment shortly after the corporation I was working at had acquired CNet where every IT department was notified by corporate IT that download.com was not a reliable site and should _never_ be used to download software into the company.
• ajdude 3y ago
  I kept reading the article waiting for this lede but it never came. That's what ultimately left a sour taste in my mouth back in the SourceForge days.
• sydd 3y ago
  Also their site was fill with intrusive ads, the repo browser was crap. GitHub was fast, no ads, markdown rendering and a decent repo browser. Also the main advantage of git was local copies, so the source code was more safe. And speed SVN was slow for large repos. At my first place we had an SVN server in the server room, when it's hard drive crashed no one could work for a day :) Still people hated git first because it was much more complicated with it's branches, PRs etc
  • jwells89 3y ago
    Yes, your first paragraph is the big standout in my memory. GitHub and Google Code were clean, uncluttered, and focused in a way that SourceForge was very much not. Almost what Google was to Excite, Lycos, etc in the early 2000s.
    • everybodyknows 3y ago
      What were Google's reasons for shutting down Code?
      • outop 3y ago
        Same as their reason for shutting down all their other projects. They only ever existed as a distraction for their underemployed workforce and as part of the PR that they have a mission other than pulling cash out of their personal-data-monetising advertising monopoly, forever.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• dotnet00 3y ago
  IIRC when Google Code was announced to be closing, the Microsoft equivalent (CodePlex) was the next location a lot of projects moved to. It had a decent UI and supported Mercurial in addition to Git. When MS also announced they were closing that and offering a tool to migrate to GitHub, was when GitHub (and Git) truly became the biggest remaining option. The other aspect of SourceForge's decline was that they doubled down on the sketchy site feeling right as acceptance of such sites was on the decline, the likes of mediafire, zippyshare etc were being replaced with cloud storage providers and download aggregators were losing popularity (in part due to also becoming very sketchy and prone to pushing malware). They might've been able to get away with it a few years earlier. I remember that back then it wasn't a huge deal to follow a mediafire download link from somewhere that seemed reliable enough, whereas nowadays it'd be an immediate red flag due to the abundance of more legitimate seeming file sharing options.
  • VonGuard 3y ago
    People used Codeplex? I thought it was just this crazy halfstep Sam Ramji convinced MS to take, leading them to open source. When it launched, Codeplex was supposed to be a source code museum, where you could see the code but not reuse it. Crazy I know, but it was what MS was comfortable with at the time, and a few years later they opened .NET. Codeplex was like an experiment to get MS to touch open source code and feel comfortable with it at a legal level, not a replacement for Sourceforge...
    • dotnet00 3y ago
      Around those times I was mostly a .NET kid and most of the .NET projects I remember looking at were on CodePlex, so maybe my perspective is a little distorted.
      • aleph_minus_one 3y ago
        Your perspective is in my experience not distorted. Programming is not a unique culture, but divided into multiple subcultures. Projects that were nearer to the .NET or Windows programming culture indeed often chose CodePlex instead of GitHub while there was a choice.
• Macha 3y ago
  Sourceforge was already long over in mindshare by that point, it basically just convinced most of the few remaining holdouts at that point. (With a few notable exceptions, like FileZilla)
• veidr 3y ago
  That's how I remember it too, with the additions that they also did a bunch of additional shit like show early-stage surveillance ads, and sign you up for unwanted mail lists by default, and more, but all less-awful than the installation of unwanted spamware). My dad runs his company accounting on GnuCash, and I sometimes help him set up a computer, and it is always startling that SourceForge even exists. (It's still the official download[1].) [1]: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/ P.S. I think you meant "death knell" but it's all good, we all understood. :)
  • sdwr 3y ago
    Death knell is the killing blow (or harbinger of?) Death rattle refers to a rattling noise produced in the lungs with one's dying breaths. Both applicable, death rattle is a little bit more appropriate though, because it's an action that sourceforge took.
    • cshimmin 3y ago
      Literally, a death knell is a bell rung (esp by a church) to indicate someone has died. Figuratively it's an event that signals an end to something.
      • fsckboy 3y ago
        as is a death toll the ringing of a bell signifying death.
  • Jenk 3y ago
    > P.S. I think you meant "death knell" but it's all good, we all understood. :) You are correct, I garbled it with "[death] bell toll" (specifically thinking of "for whom the bell tolls.")
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• jzb 3y ago
  The bundling thing happened after Sourceforge was already well in decline, 2013, which was five years after GitHub launched. Google Code shutdown was announced 2015. IIRC Sourceforge was becoming less relevant because it hadn’t introduced git support, and GitHub answered that demand. By the time it added it, it was too late. Bundling adware with software was not the death knell for Sourceforge, it was a death rattle - though the corpse is livelier than I’d have thought ten-plus years later.
  • iforgotpassword 3y ago
    Hm, it feels the adware was a bit later, or rather I should be surprised how early sourceforge fell into irrelevance in my circles. When it made the news I was pretty much just shrugging "well nobody's using that anymore anyways" It's just one of the examples where somebody came along offering pretty much the same thing but just with a different focus (code/collab), and arguably also relevant a cleaner, fresher look.
  • jjfoooo6 3y ago
    It's baffling in retrospect how Google couldn't recognize the strategic opportunity of Google Code.
• neilv 3y ago
  IIRC, Sourceforge's reputation was being tarnished even before the malware. Sourceforge had some kind of data loss incident, whereupon open source developers I knew started referring to it as "Sourceforget". Later, one day someone said in a group of Linux developers, "So, Linus made a version control system...", kinda amused. I didn't know whether Torvalds was actually going to use it for Linux, and didn't even consider that it might be adopted by pretty much all software developers of any kind. It was even named "git", like it was aggressively trying to be unmarketable. But at some point, GitHub emerged, and grew a very favorable reputation. Then they sold out.
  • doublerabbit 3y ago
    > Then they sold out. Ah, finally someone recollects the original. People look at me funny when I tell them it wasn't an Microsoft creation.
    • Affric 3y ago
      Christ I am old
    • DANmode 3y ago
      "People"?
    • ahartmetz 3y ago
      Jeez man, everyone knows that most Microsoft products with any success are acquisitions. In the cases of Windows NT and C#, they just bought the designers.
• awill 3y ago
  It is mind boggling that Google has given up on so many potential businesses like code because they didn’t think the market was big enough.
• pipes 3y ago
  A few years ago I recall the new CEO sort of relaunched source forge on hacker news and seemed very keen to listen to feedback. I wonder what ever happened with that.
• ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  For me (I used to use SF), it was as simple as it took SF years to adopt Git, and I liked Git a lot more than SVN. At the time, GH was pretty much the best expression of hosted Git out there.
• wslh 3y ago
  Yes, I didn't remember a continuum between SF and GitHub but the obvious demise of SF et al (Greshmeat, Slashdot, etc).
• billllll 3y ago
  Including those events would certainly change the picture. I don't like how the article implies that all this was a result of GitHub founders being smart rather than SourceForge misplaying their hand. The article smacks of the irrational worship of successful founders that's so common. In reality, I think there was (and still is, albeit small) market for alternative hosting, and there definitely were niches where SourceForge was better at (downloading binaries, for example). If SourceForge didn't misplay their hand, it's entirely possible Github won't have the near monopoly on open source hosting they have now.
• zeruch 3y ago
  The second VA Linux sold off it's hardware division, and definitely after co-founder Larry Augustins departure, the die was cast. The company, and Sourceforge's leadership, lost all tethering to the community that fostered them, and the firm got passed around from buyer to buyer like a blunt at a Phish concert.