5 ms·

It’s short for Source Forge which is still around technically but a shadow of its former self.

PaulHoule 2y ago
It was early example of the "enshittification" phenomenon. It was a particular bad example of advertising and other spammy distractions because sites for developers have the lowest CPM of anything except maybe anime fan sites. It is super hard to break through a two-sided market but it is possible when a competitor has given up entirely on competition, which might have happened in the SourceForge case because the money situation was so dire they couldn't afford to invest in it.
- eric-hu 2y ago
  Didn’t they also start packaging malware into binary downloads?
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    Yep.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    By then they were already desperate from the previous enshittification.
  - progmetaldev 2y ago
    Was it actual malware? I thought it was just automatically checked software like the Ask.com toolbar for Internet Explorer, along with the Oracle.com JAVA JRE. Maybe I was just more careful than most, but I have been using FileZilla for many years, and never had any of these issues as long as I paid attention to the installer and what was included.
    - eric-hu 2y ago
      You got a chuckle out of me with such a specific reference that I know I got auto-installed too. I don't know, personally, but I do recall reading accounts of malware from them from around that era. I suppose I would call what I saw "Grayware" [1], which is debatably not malware (but debatably is, too). It was enough of a smell for me to stop using their site, though. I'd actually just forego software I was seeking out from them instead. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware#Grayware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware#Grayware
      - progmetaldev 2y ago
        I definitely don't deny that what they did was definitely not on the "up and up", for sure. Dark patterns, and I haven't heard the term "grayware" before, but it definitely fits! I was only lucky because I actually watch installers, and tend to mess with install locations, strictly when it comes to Windows software. I would prefer to be on a Linux-distro for work, but it's honestly just easier for me to stick with Windows because I have to help so many other people, and I know I would eventually end up losing the (current) knowledge of what can go wrong with Windows. Over time, I would be out of touch.
        eric-hu 2y ago
        I only learned the term grayware from this thread. I wasn't sure precisely what did and didn't qualify as malware, so I checked Wikipedia and found it there. As for the Windows fear, I understand that. That was me 10+ years ago, and I _am_ less knowledgable at helping people with Windows these days. I can still figure some things out by searching, and "I couldn't figure it out after 5-10 minutes" has turned out to be an acceptable answer too sometimes :)
- 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
  ...lowest CPM of anything except maybe anime fan sites. I am not in ads, so could you expand on this? Why are anime sites low value vs other niche? I would naively expect that anime has huge numbers of <20 year old fans who are more prone to advertising merchandise.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    They pirate or already subscribe to Crunchroll. Many sites are nowhere near brand safe (one reason Danbooru is as good as it is that is not even brand safe for porn ads.) Some of them buy figurines, but they already know where to get them. Good smile would rather invest in 4chan than buy ads on western anime sites. I have no idea what it is like in Japan. I am skeptical of claims that “advertisers want to target young people because they have a lifetime of consumption ahead of them”. Maybe that is true of Proctor and Gamble (who expect to still be selling Dawn and Tide 50 years from now) but few advertisers are thinking ahead more than one quarter, if that —- particularly in the internet age where an ad click can be tracked to a transaction. People today will say all the ads on TV target oldsters because only oldsters watch TV but circa 2000 there was no streaming and watching TV made me think “I want to die before I get old” because there were so many ads for drugs and embarrassing health conditions and personal injury lawyers and relatively little for things you would spend your own money on because not a lot of people in the audience have money to spend particularly after paying the cable bill.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- giantrobot 2y ago
  A small SourceForge retrospective for those not around at the time: This post's overview of contributing to Open Source is largely correct. You'd get the source tarball for a project, make some changes, and then e-mail the author/maintainer witch a patch. Despite the post's claim Open Source existed long before 1998. Rarely did Internet randos have any access to a project's VCS. A lot of "projects" (really just a program written by a single person) didn't even have meaningful VCS, running CVS or RVS were skills unto themselves. There was also the issue that a lot of Open Source was written by students and hosted on school servers or an old Linux box in a dorm. SourceForge came along riding the first Internet bubble. They let a lot of small FOSS projects go legit by giving them a project homepage without a .edu domain or tilde in it. They also got a managed VCS (CVS at first then Subversion later) and contact e-Mail addresses, forums, and other bits that made the lives of Linux distro and BSD ports maintainers much easier. They also had a number of mirror sites which enabled a level of high availability most projects could never have had previously. Then SourceForge's enshitification began as bubble money ran out. The free tier of features was decreased and then they started bundling AdWare into Windows installers. SourceForge would literally repackage a Windows installer to install the FOSS application and some bullshit AdWare, IIRC a browser toolbar was a major one. As the officially upstream source for FOSS projects bundled for package managers the AdWare wasn't much of a problem. But SourceForge was the distribution channel for a significant amount of Windows FOSS apps like VLC, MirandaIM, and a bunch of P2P apps which were impacted by the AdWare bundling at various points. A GitHub founder patting themselves on the back for the success of GitHub is sort of funny because GitHub followed a similar track to SourceForge but got bought by Microsoft instead of a company coasting on VC money. I can easily imagine a world where an independent GitHub enshittified had they not been bought by a money fountain.
  - jakub_g 2y ago
    > GitHub followed a similar track to SourceForge Can you provide an example?
    - giantrobot 2y ago
      GitHub offered a better experience than the existing offerings. They then scaled massively to the point where it was expensive to run without a lot of good options for monetization. Thankfully for GitHub they got bought by Microsoft and not say Verizon or GameStop (which owns the corpse of SourceForge for unfathomable reasons). GitHub could have easily enshittified in an effort to make money had they not been bought by someone with deep pockets.
philipkglass 2y ago
There is still some code hosted on SourceForge that has no other public source. This is unsettling because I don't know how long SourceForge will continue operating and Wayback Machine captures of SF pages don't include tarballs. Download backups yourself whenever you find something like this. I'm contributing to someone's software that started as an academic project. The current version is on GitHub with history back to 2014 but early releases back to 2008 (from before the author started using version control) are on SF in the form release_1.0.tgz, release_1.1.tgz, etc. I stumbled on these old versions this weekend while looking for related material. Once I decompressed them I found that they contained notes and old code that really helps to understand the current project's evolution and structure.
- LegionMammal978 2y ago
  Yeah, what especially irks me with SourceForge is the common habit of projects regularly deleting all outdated releases (due to some per-project size limit? or just not to clutter up the list?). In old projects with messy releases, it can be very hard to piece together exactly which revisions went into a version "x.y.z" that everyone else depended on, except by actually looking into the released files. If those files don't get archived anywhere, they just get lost to the ether. (At least, short of a manhunt for anyone with the files in an ancient backup at the bottom of the sea.)
cruffle_duffle 2y ago
"shadow of its former self" Was there ever a point in time where it wasn't something that basically sucked? For some reason there are still some widely used ham radio packages that are hosted on sourceforge and it annoys me greatly. When you click the big green "Download" for the project you get.... .... a dll file. Why? Because the actual release artifact is some other zip file and for some reason it doesn't deserve the "Big Green Download" button. SF has always been this bad. Their core data model just doesn't jive with how people actually interact with open source projects. ... and for that matter didn't they stir up some controversy a long while ago for tampering with project artifacts and adding extra "stuff" in them? (spyware / nagware / **ware?)
- toast0 2y ago
  > Was there ever a point in time where it wasn't something that basically sucked? Yeah, when it launched it was cool and hip. Free public CVS server to host your open source cool project was cool. Probably went downhill as the ad market fell apart post dot-com, and the only way to get revenue was big green download buttons.
- progmetaldev 2y ago
  Yes, they used to be great for open source projects. They did get wrapped up in controversy where another company took over and were including other software in the installers, if you weren't careful to uncheck the optional (and unrelated) software. There is still great software hosted there, like FileZilla if you use a Windows environment. FileZilla did have the optional software installs for about a year or so, but as long as you paid attention, it was easy to get around (you just had to pay attention, but that's not an excuse for what they did).
- mnau 2y ago
  Yes, they were cool once upon a time. It the place to be, you didn't have to host your own CVS without charge (no git back then, hell, even SVN was released few years after SF). It was like geocities. It looks almopst impossible today, but launching a service was really hard and expensive back then. It cost a lot of money/effort in just software. All that stuff you can just download and it actually works? No way man, didn't exist yet. That is why LAMP stack was so great back then, it was free, working and reasonably low-maintenence and super easy to set-up.

It was early example of the "enshittification" phenomenon. It was a particular bad example of advertising and other spammy distractions because sites for developers have the lowest CPM of anything except maybe anime fan sites. It is super hard to break through a two-sided market but it is possible when a competitor has given up entirely on competition, which might have happened in the SourceForge case because the money situation was so dire they couldn't afford to invest in it.

eric-hu 2y ago
Didn’t they also start packaging malware into binary downloads?
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  Yep.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  By then they were already desperate from the previous enshittification.
- progmetaldev 2y ago
  Was it actual malware? I thought it was just automatically checked software like the Ask.com toolbar for Internet Explorer, along with the Oracle.com JAVA JRE. Maybe I was just more careful than most, but I have been using FileZilla for many years, and never had any of these issues as long as I paid attention to the installer and what was included.
  - eric-hu 2y ago
    You got a chuckle out of me with such a specific reference that I know I got auto-installed too. I don't know, personally, but I do recall reading accounts of malware from them from around that era. I suppose I would call what I saw "Grayware" [1], which is debatably not malware (but debatably is, too). It was enough of a smell for me to stop using their site, though. I'd actually just forego software I was seeking out from them instead. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware#Grayware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware#Grayware
    - progmetaldev 2y ago
      I definitely don't deny that what they did was definitely not on the "up and up", for sure. Dark patterns, and I haven't heard the term "grayware" before, but it definitely fits! I was only lucky because I actually watch installers, and tend to mess with install locations, strictly when it comes to Windows software. I would prefer to be on a Linux-distro for work, but it's honestly just easier for me to stick with Windows because I have to help so many other people, and I know I would eventually end up losing the (current) knowledge of what can go wrong with Windows. Over time, I would be out of touch.
      - eric-hu 2y ago
        I only learned the term grayware from this thread. I wasn't sure precisely what did and didn't qualify as malware, so I checked Wikipedia and found it there. As for the Windows fear, I understand that. That was me 10+ years ago, and I _am_ less knowledgable at helping people with Windows these days. I can still figure some things out by searching, and "I couldn't figure it out after 5-10 minutes" has turned out to be an acceptable answer too sometimes :)
3eb7988a1663 2y ago
...lowest CPM of anything except maybe anime fan sites. I am not in ads, so could you expand on this? Why are anime sites low value vs other niche? I would naively expect that anime has huge numbers of <20 year old fans who are more prone to advertising merchandise.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  They pirate or already subscribe to Crunchroll. Many sites are nowhere near brand safe (one reason Danbooru is as good as it is that is not even brand safe for porn ads.) Some of them buy figurines, but they already know where to get them. Good smile would rather invest in 4chan than buy ads on western anime sites. I have no idea what it is like in Japan. I am skeptical of claims that “advertisers want to target young people because they have a lifetime of consumption ahead of them”. Maybe that is true of Proctor and Gamble (who expect to still be selling Dawn and Tide 50 years from now) but few advertisers are thinking ahead more than one quarter, if that —- particularly in the internet age where an ad click can be tracked to a transaction. People today will say all the ads on TV target oldsters because only oldsters watch TV but circa 2000 there was no streaming and watching TV made me think “I want to die before I get old” because there were so many ads for drugs and embarrassing health conditions and personal injury lawyers and relatively little for things you would spend your own money on because not a lot of people in the audience have money to spend particularly after paying the cable bill.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
giantrobot 2y ago
A small SourceForge retrospective for those not around at the time: This post's overview of contributing to Open Source is largely correct. You'd get the source tarball for a project, make some changes, and then e-mail the author/maintainer witch a patch. Despite the post's claim Open Source existed long before 1998. Rarely did Internet randos have any access to a project's VCS. A lot of "projects" (really just a program written by a single person) didn't even have meaningful VCS, running CVS or RVS were skills unto themselves. There was also the issue that a lot of Open Source was written by students and hosted on school servers or an old Linux box in a dorm. SourceForge came along riding the first Internet bubble. They let a lot of small FOSS projects go legit by giving them a project homepage without a .edu domain or tilde in it. They also got a managed VCS (CVS at first then Subversion later) and contact e-Mail addresses, forums, and other bits that made the lives of Linux distro and BSD ports maintainers much easier. They also had a number of mirror sites which enabled a level of high availability most projects could never have had previously. Then SourceForge's enshitification began as bubble money ran out. The free tier of features was decreased and then they started bundling AdWare into Windows installers. SourceForge would literally repackage a Windows installer to install the FOSS application and some bullshit AdWare, IIRC a browser toolbar was a major one. As the officially upstream source for FOSS projects bundled for package managers the AdWare wasn't much of a problem. But SourceForge was the distribution channel for a significant amount of Windows FOSS apps like VLC, MirandaIM, and a bunch of P2P apps which were impacted by the AdWare bundling at various points. A GitHub founder patting themselves on the back for the success of GitHub is sort of funny because GitHub followed a similar track to SourceForge but got bought by Microsoft instead of a company coasting on VC money. I can easily imagine a world where an independent GitHub enshittified had they not been bought by a money fountain.
- jakub_g 2y ago
  > GitHub followed a similar track to SourceForge Can you provide an example?
  - giantrobot 2y ago
    GitHub offered a better experience than the existing offerings. They then scaled massively to the point where it was expensive to run without a lot of good options for monetization. Thankfully for GitHub they got bought by Microsoft and not say Verizon or GameStop (which owns the corpse of SourceForge for unfathomable reasons). GitHub could have easily enshittified in an effort to make money had they not been bought by someone with deep pockets.

philipkglass 2y ago

There is still some code hosted on SourceForge that has no other public source. This is unsettling because I don't know how long SourceForge will continue operating and Wayback Machine captures of SF pages don't include tarballs. Download backups yourself whenever you find something like this. I'm contributing to someone's software that started as an academic project. The current version is on GitHub with history back to 2014 but early releases back to 2008 (from before the author started using version control) are on SF in the form release_1.0.tgz, release_1.1.tgz, etc. I stumbled on these old versions this weekend while looking for related material. Once I decompressed them I found that they contained notes and old code that really helps to understand the current project's evolution and structure.

LegionMammal978 2y ago
Yeah, what especially irks me with SourceForge is the common habit of projects regularly deleting all outdated releases (due to some per-project size limit? or just not to clutter up the list?). In old projects with messy releases, it can be very hard to piece together exactly which revisions went into a version "x.y.z" that everyone else depended on, except by actually looking into the released files. If those files don't get archived anywhere, they just get lost to the ether. (At least, short of a manhunt for anyone with the files in an ancient backup at the bottom of the sea.)

cruffle_duffle 2y ago

"shadow of its former self" Was there ever a point in time where it wasn't something that basically sucked? For some reason there are still some widely used ham radio packages that are hosted on sourceforge and it annoys me greatly. When you click the big green "Download" for the project you get.... .... a dll file. Why? Because the actual release artifact is some other zip file and for some reason it doesn't deserve the "Big Green Download" button. SF has always been this bad. Their core data model just doesn't jive with how people actually interact with open source projects. ... and for that matter didn't they stir up some controversy a long while ago for tampering with project artifacts and adding extra "stuff" in them? (spyware / nagware / **ware?)

toast0 2y ago
> Was there ever a point in time where it wasn't something that basically sucked? Yeah, when it launched it was cool and hip. Free public CVS server to host your open source cool project was cool. Probably went downhill as the ad market fell apart post dot-com, and the only way to get revenue was big green download buttons.
progmetaldev 2y ago
Yes, they used to be great for open source projects. They did get wrapped up in controversy where another company took over and were including other software in the installers, if you weren't careful to uncheck the optional (and unrelated) software. There is still great software hosted there, like FileZilla if you use a Windows environment. FileZilla did have the optional software installs for about a year or so, but as long as you paid attention, it was easy to get around (you just had to pay attention, but that's not an excuse for what they did).
mnau 2y ago
Yes, they were cool once upon a time. It the place to be, you didn't have to host your own CVS without charge (no git back then, hell, even SVN was released few years after SF). It was like geocities. It looks almopst impossible today, but launching a service was really hard and expensive back then. It cost a lot of money/effort in just software. All that stuff you can just download and it actually works? No way man, didn't exist yet. That is why LAMP stack was so great back then, it was free, working and reasonably low-maintenence and super easy to set-up.