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The rise of github also coincided with enshitification of sourceforge.net. SF although was not git based at that time but it had the mindshare of lot of open so

The rise of github also coincided with enshitification of sourceforge.net. SF although was not git based at that time but it had the mindshare of lot of open source projects and it went complete downhill. So, a downfall of a potential alternative was also a factor IMO. Edit: after I commented I realized that SF was already mentioned in other comment

schacon 2y ago
I would argue that SF was always pretty shitty, because it focused entirely on advertising. I remember Chris giving a talk comparing the signup process of GitHub and SourceForge. SF had like 8 fields and GitHub had 2. This was because SF wanted to know ad demographic info - where did you hear about us, etc. GitHub just wanted a name and a password. But this was the difference in everything - SF cared about advertisers, not developers. GitHub never thought about what anyone other than the developers using the product wanted.
- devnull3 2y ago
  Agree but my point is when you see a new and better rival then instead of pivoting SF became even worse and became malware-ised. Also SF was based on SVN. They failed to understand and capitalize on a better tech on the market i.e. git.
  - schacon 2y ago
    They actually did so very early. In early 2009 they added Git, Hg and Bzr support: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/03/sourceforge-adds-support-for-new-version-control-systems/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/03/sourc... That's less than a year after GitHub launched and was still very small.
    - devnull3 2y ago
      I stand corrected! Thanks!
hadlock 2y ago
Sourceforge was always awful to navigate. Because it was dependent on ad revenue, not subscriptions. It was trying to compete with consumer focused things like download.com (remember that ?) where the end user just wanted a tarball of the executable, and the host was trying to make money selling ad space on the page where the download link was. The fact that end users could peek at the folder structure of the source code was a novelty at best

schacon 2y ago

I would argue that SF was always pretty shitty, because it focused entirely on advertising. I remember Chris giving a talk comparing the signup process of GitHub and SourceForge. SF had like 8 fields and GitHub had 2. This was because SF wanted to know ad demographic info - where did you hear about us, etc. GitHub just wanted a name and a password. But this was the difference in everything - SF cared about advertisers, not developers. GitHub never thought about what anyone other than the developers using the product wanted.

devnull3 2y ago
Agree but my point is when you see a new and better rival then instead of pivoting SF became even worse and became malware-ised. Also SF was based on SVN. They failed to understand and capitalize on a better tech on the market i.e. git.
- schacon 2y ago
  They actually did so very early. In early 2009 they added Git, Hg and Bzr support: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/03/sourceforge-adds-support-for-new-version-control-systems/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/03/sourc... That's less than a year after GitHub launched and was still very small.
  - devnull3 2y ago
    I stand corrected! Thanks!

hadlock 2y ago

Sourceforge was always awful to navigate. Because it was dependent on ad revenue, not subscriptions. It was trying to compete with consumer focused things like download.com (remember that ?) where the end user just wanted a tarball of the executable, and the host was trying to make money selling ad space on the page where the download link was. The fact that end users could peek at the folder structure of the source code was a novelty at best