11 ms·

Goodbye, Sourceforge

459 points by chris-at 11y ago

na85 11y ago
I find this state of affairs rather tragic. To see what was one of the pioneers of the global open-source movement reduced to such infamy.
- wyclif 11y ago
  Tragic, but I see no reason to shed any tears. Sites come and go, and when they change hands the new operators are often sleazy. Today we have Github. If they end up doing the same thing, there will be a new VCS site. Nerds won't tolerate crapware.
  - 72deluxe 11y ago
    I remember when they were bought by VA (I think?), the same time as Slashdot changed hands I think. I remember signing up for an account years ago and having to use Putty and SSH keys to upload data which was revolutionary to FTP-aware me. There was an awful lot of software on there (who remembers visiting freshmeat.net to look for daily updates or search for software too????) but I think it would be sad to not realise how great it was that they offered free hosting and tools. They used to have a compile-farm that you could use to build software on different platforms and architectures but this got retired a long time ago. For the free tools you got, it wasn't bad! I think "nerds" are quick to forget that. It was FREE
    - precision 11y ago
      SourceForge wasn't bought by VA, it was started as a skunkworks projects by 4 developers inside of VA. Once the site started to get traction is when the corporate overlords started taking notice and forcing the horrible Ads, and now crapware onto the site.
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  TBF, the way I see it they only did the hosting and making the money; I don't remember them actively supporting open source or the ideals behind it, or being open source developers themselves and contributing, or making their own software open source. Having a revenue model that involves making your users guess which DOWNLOAD button will actually download the application is not the open source spirit.
  - sanswork 11y ago
    The code running the site was original open source but they closed it a long time ago. Probably as part of one of the many buy outs over its history. GForge came from it.
  - Nullabillity 11y ago
    AFAIK their website was originally open source, with GForge, FusionForge, and GNU's Savannah based on it. Then they had a longer stint staying closed, but they opened back up a couple of years ago, and their current software, Allura, is open source again, though (slightly ironically) now as part of Apache.
    - precision 11y ago
      The core developers behind it were always Open Source advocates.. but we were always at a war with the corporate overlords.
  - hahamrfunnyguy 11y ago
    The guess the download crap appeared in the past 8-10 years. Before that the site was fairly trustworthy even though there was always ads and the like.
yAnonymous 11y ago
It's high time that SF lands on malware blocklists.
nekopa 11y ago
I was shocked the other day when I went to grab FileZilla from SF, and my virus scanner tagged it for malware. I hadn't realized it had fallen so far as to bundle crapware. SF used to be my goto site for looking for weird open source stuff. Now I guess I will have to finally take SF off my list goto sites. You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.
- laurent123456 11y ago
  It was FileZilla's developers who decided to bundle crapware with their installer on SF so can't really blame SF on this. See there: https://forum.filezilla-project.org/viewtopic.php?t=31127 https://forum.filezilla-project.org/viewtopic.php?t=31127 "This is by design. In any case, nothing is forced upon you, all offers are entirely optional and are only being displayed during setup."
  - tonyedgecombe 11y ago
    I guess this is what happens when people aren't willing to pay for software, there are plenty of really good ftp clients out there for not very much money.
    - fapjacks 11y ago
      Exactly. Just look at all the software for Linux. :T
      - tonyedgecombe 11y ago
        Outside of developer tools the software landscape for Linux doesn't look that great.
        tracker1 11y ago
        Well, Steam seems to be growing pretty nicely... Also, for most users a good Browser is all they need. Which is why I love Chromebooks as an option for most people.
eterm 11y ago
If I were a project manager who run a sourceforge account the last thing I would do now is abandon it. Why? Because SF have proven if I were to do so they'd take my work under my name and bundle their crap into it. The only way to stop that is to keep it active. That feeling of being trapped into a terrible system because it'll screw over people even worse if you leave.
- Grue3 11y ago
  GIMP-win owner actually did upload new binaries to SF account. There hasn't been a GIMP release for a while, but the SF repo was never abandoned. SF is blatantly lying about this. So no, not abandoning the account won't save you.
- nudpiedo 11y ago
  That's illegal (with the European laws).
  - maaaats 11y ago
    Which laws?
- netheril96 11y ago
  Could the hypothetical you remove the project?
- hrjet 11y ago
  > they'd take my work under my name and bundle their crap into it. Oh, is that a thing? I was surprised when the Lobo project's admin rights were handed over to some relatively unknown developer. I had a long and confusing discussion with the new project admin here: https://github.com/UprootLabs/gngr/issues/87#issuecomment-86528159 https://github.com/UprootLabs/gngr/issues/87#issuecomment-86...
wldlyinaccurate 11y ago
I've found that Sourceforge is still the only place you can get a lot of good-but-unmaintained software. I was there just the other week for the Saxon project[1], and it was painful to see how low SF have sunk. I wonder if it would be possible (and legal) for somebody who isn't the project owner to copy some of these unmaintained projects into another system? [1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/saxon/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/saxon/
- pan69 11y ago
  I remembered Saxon being an Apache project, but it's not. I must have remembered wrong. Anyhow, it should be an Apache project. http://www.apache.org/#projects-list http://www.apache.org/#projects-list
  - guard-of-terra 11y ago
    Xalan is Apache project so there will be redundancy. (I remember they had a dozen Java MVC frameworks 10 years ago tho)
    - pan69 11y ago
      I think I might have things mixed up with Xalan. It's been a long time since I used it...
  - inimino 11y ago
    Saxon has a free version and an "enterprise" version, and the developer also operates a consulting business around it, so it's not a likely candidate for an Apache project.
- imron 11y ago
  The project is licensed under the MPL 2.0 (and 1.0) which states: Each Contributor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license ... to use, reproduce, make available, modify, display, perform, distribute, and otherwise exploit its Contributions, either on an unmodified basis, with Modifications, or as part of a Larger Work; So the answer (at least for Saxon) is yes! Just make sure you conform to the licence requirements and you're good to go.
laurent123456 11y ago
To be honest I can't say I have any good memory of Sourceforge. It used to a heavy website with a confusing UI, and never really got better over the years. When Google Code started, I was glad I could move to it, and then GitHub.
- DanBC 11y ago
  There was a time when it had just opened when it was a really useful place to get opensource software. The Usenet group alt.comp.freeware converted several people to the idea of open source by having links to sourceforge posted there.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- coldpie 11y ago
  Yeah. I started getting involved with OSS in the mid-00s. I suspect SourceForge's heyday was before that. So SF has always been a slightly shady repository of software in my view, though the adware bundling is a new low.
- jcd748 11y ago
  In the late 90s, Sourceforge (and Freshmeat) were really good places to get software. But even in the early 00s, it felt dusty and dated.
- danellis 11y ago
  Yeah, they always had a horribly confusing UI that made it non-obvious how to get to a project's homepage, even -- the thing that should be front and centre! However, I did enjoy playing around with their compile farm when they had that. Think it only lasted a couple of years, though.
- cmrdporcupine 11y ago
  Yeah I don't get this "SourceForge, once a trustworthy source code hosting site" -- that is simply untrue. Maybe for the 1st year or two after its launch, but it has been subject to all sorts of crappy management since at least 1999/2000. I used to have projects there, and contribute to projects there (argh memories of terrible CVS) and it was always slow, always had a terrible UI, and very early in its history became submerged in bad ads and out-links to bad content. It should just die.
frik 11y ago
Can Archive.org/etc backup all the open source projects from Sourceforge.org and Google Code? It would be a big loss if the unmaintained but often still very useful source code get lost forever.
- anc84 11y ago
  There is some work being done by the (unaffiliated) Archiveteam to do that, see http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=SourceForge http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=SourceForge and http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Talk:SourceForge http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Talk:SourceForge Help if you can, it's fun! #archiveteam on EFNet.
- fishbacon 11y ago
  It looks like ArchiveTeam[1] already has a lot of SF archived. [1]http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=SourceForge http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=SourceForge
tempodox 11y ago
I still land on SF now and then, to download sources that are hosted there. But that only happens because another site's “Download” button sent me there. In the beginning I was very impressed with SF. But as others have said, the UI is rather confusing and those ads they've been showing would devalue any site they run on to “lower-tier crap you need rubber gloves for”. A sad development.
jongalloway2 11y ago
If you're downloading open source software on Windows, friendly reminder to get it via Chocolatey rather than ever clicking on a download button. Chocolatey has reviewed, silent, direct, crapware free downloads of just about anything you'd want. https://chocolatey.org/packages https://chocolatey.org/packages
- raesene9 11y ago
  Not too sure you can rely on Chocolatey to be direct..? Last time I installed WinDirStat using Chocolatey it got the install file from Sourceforge (over an unencrypted HTTP connection) http://imgur.com/fajFMUA http://imgur.com/fajFMUA
  - jongalloway2 11y ago
    It links to official installers which are sometimes on SourceForge, but uses installer switches to set options to deselect crapware, do silent install, etc.
- adam12 11y ago
  Ninite is pretty slick and crapware free. https://ninite.com/ https://ninite.com/ I can't wait for the new package manager in Windows 10, though.
  - raesene9 11y ago
    It would be cool to have a Windows "official" package manager, however I don't think their initial launch is going to be that. From what I understand, it's more of a "package manager-manager" so it manages other systems (like Chocolatey) rather than running the repos itself.
    - chebum 11y ago
      There is Windows Marketplace for that.
imron 11y ago
I still have a project hosted on Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pinyinput/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/pinyinput/). They haven't injected their own installer on downloads so for the time being I leave it there because I'm too lazy to move it off. A while back I did move the main project page to its own domain, so I'm only really using Sourceforge for downloads and source control (although the project is stable and hasn't had commits for a long time so not even that really).
xrstf 11y ago
For a second there, I thought this was an official GitHub page and thought "Wow, those GitHub guys really have balls to attack SF that directly". But then I realized it is "helb" and not "help" in the URL.
- helb 11y ago
  Author here. Sorry about that confusion, i probably should host it elsewhere… Help/helb is not intentional, it's just my nickname since 2nd grade or so.
  - sounds 11y ago
    You have a disclaimer at the bottom of the page. I was also confused by the help/helb thing until I saw the disclaimer.
- yaph 11y ago
  Wonder how many others thought exactly the same, I did too.
  - specto 11y ago
    I assumed it wasn't, but I hoped
  - helb 11y ago
    Sorry about that… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9624068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9624068
- jotm 11y ago
  They don't have to say anything when their users do it for them :-)
- espadrine 11y ago
  I think that was part of the reason to switch from github.com to github.io a while back. Their .io is user content and can be downgraded by Google independently from github.com.
fapjacks 11y ago
Well, to be honest, this is exactly where Sourceforge has been headed for years and years. You could look at its behavior years ago and say "Yeah, follow this out on a line" and see this exact situation in the crystal ball. Sourceforge has been scummy (and getting scummier) for years and years.
- tracker1 11y ago
  I remember actually keeping a couple of service accounts on services that served as mirrors for SF for years just because they backed the service (early on, before a lot of the sleazy stuff started). Unfortunately, short of registering a trademark with the PTO, it'd be difficult to get a lot of this crapware removed from SF.
jsingleton 11y ago
Perhaps it is worth asking the mirror services to put some pressure on as well as the content creators? These are two popular mirrors in the UK & Ireland (both academic institutions): http://www.mirrorservice.org/ http://www.mirrorservice.org/ (University of Kent) http://ftp.heanet.ie/ http://ftp.heanet.ie/ (Ireland’s National Education and Research Network)
- zokier 11y ago
  I agree that this would be the best recourse if we could manage to muster some sort of coordinated exodus of mirrors. Mirror providers have at least some sort of power over SF due the service they are providing, something that project authors do not have. Many of the mirrors I think are academic and I don't think they too happy about SF being such leech that they are.
- frik 11y ago
  As Github.com lacks afaik a binary hosting / download feature and Google Code closed its service (no new projects) - it would be great if all the Sourceforge mirrors (heanet, etc.) would be coordinated from an open source community instead of coordinated by Sourceforge.org. There is definitely a need for a binary hosting and mailing list website for open source projects, to fill the hole that Sourceforge may leave behind. I remember the "BerliOS" from a Germany's Fraunhofer institute that was a kind of clone of Sourceforge, a open source project hosting service. It was closed in 2013 and some valuable code and binaries are lost forever.
  - pierrec 11y ago
    Github does have a pretty good binary hosting / download feature, it's called Releases. There's even an API to automate it. It's not very widely used, perhaps because it only rolled out it 2013. About Releases: https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software An example: https://github.com/adobe/brackets/releases/ https://github.com/adobe/brackets/releases/ As for mailing lists, I guess their excuse is that they already provide possibilities for discussion in the issue tracker (which can be also interacted with entirely by mail). This is appropriate as a forum for developers - but not a forum for users, which would be out of Github's scope, IMO.
eps 11y ago
What's unsettling about this is that Slashdot also belongs to the same company that turned SF into the crapware distributor that it is now.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  Slashdot split from Thinkgeek a few years back.
  - simoncion 11y ago
    Both Slashdot and SourceForge are currently owned by the company that owns Dice.com.
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      Good point. Thanks. I'd thought Collab.net ended up with them. Need to review the history.
      - dbellizzi 11y ago
        Collab ended up with the business version, SourceForge Enterprise Edition (SFEE), which was a Java rewrite of sourceforge.net shipped as installed software.
- flyinghamster 11y ago
  Not only that, but a quick search for GIMP on Slashdot turns up absolutely no discussion about the hijack. There was an <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/11/07/2328228/gimp-citing-ad-policies-moves-to-ftp-rather-than-sourceforge-downloads">article http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/11/07/2328228/gimp-citing-a... in 2013 that GIMP was moving</a>, and <a href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/11/14/2036200/sourceforge-appeals-to-readers-for-help-nixing-bad-ad-actors">another http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/11/14/2036200/source... a week later</a> about SF's ad policies (LOL!), but absolutely nothing from this week. Color me unsurprised. I knew /. was heading downhill, but this is the final nail in the coffin.
wyldfire 11y ago
Guilt by association? Perhaps SF is not the true source of badness/malware but instead they tend to host the projects most likely to include such malware.
- connor4312 11y ago
  No, they definitely are... http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/sourceforge-grabs-gimp-for-windows-account-wraps-installer-in-bundle-pushing-adware/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/source...
  - wyldfire 11y ago
    Tsk, that's pretty damning.
- abritishguy 11y ago
  SF takes over abandoned projects and ads the adware themselves.
bnferguson 11y ago
May be worth noting that GitHub supports SVN as well (https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clients/ https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clie...), I believe some of the others do as well IIRC. May be important to some legacy projects trying to get off of SF.
- amyjess 11y ago
  If they also added a Mercurial bridge, that would be the final nail in SF's coffin. It's sad that with Google Code going away, a lot of projects that chose Google Code for Mercurial are being pushed to switch to git (e.g. vim) because Google is pushing so hard for projects to be migrated to GitHub,
patio11 11y ago
Sourceforge is essentially a gigantic set of Google doorway pages which MITM downloads initiated by unsuspecting (largely non-technical) Internet users of popular free-as-in-beer projects. They're open about doing this. https://sourceforge.net/blog/gimp-win-project-wasnt-hijacked-just-abandoned/ https://sourceforge.net/blog/gimp-win-project-wasnt-hijacked... These "mirror" (MITM) pages outrank the authoritative sites for many projects because Sourceforge has been around for 10+ years and has superior trust/backlink profiles compared to the newer author-blessed sites which presently host the software. Gimp is actually fortunate in this regard -- gimp.org is stickied to the top spot when searching [gimp] and Sourceforge floats around #8 or so. Sourceforge should get hit with Google's standard penalty, which is "we smite your rankings with the hammer of an avenging god." Minimally, Google should at least tighten up their enforcement of AdWords policies. Their "installers" are per-se violations of the Unwanted Software Policy (http://www.google.com/about/company/unwanted-software-policy.html?hl=en http://www.google.com/about/company/unwanted-software-policy...). How about it, resident Googlers?
- stfnppv 11y ago
  There you go. https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/ https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/
  - dordoka 11y ago
    Reported
  - Ueland 11y ago
    Thank you, also reported the site now.
  - joshrivers 11y ago
    Reported
  - gauravphoenix 11y ago
    Reported. If you report, please provide some reason. I provided- "embeds malware/adware with downloads"
billsix 11y ago
I like that they open-sourced their engine. https://allura.apache.org/ https://allura.apache.org/
moron4hire 11y ago
>> SourceForge, once a trustworthy source code hosting site... No, SourceForge was always sleazy.
- helb 11y ago
  It wasn't in 90s and early 00s… Along with Freshmeat (and The Linux Game Tome :)), they were pretty useful websites.
  - moron4hire 11y ago
    Wikipedia says SourceForge launched November of 1999. I remember as early as 2003 thinking it was sleazy how it tried to trick you into downloading adware with their big "Download Now!" ads. So maybe not literally "always", but certainly the majority of time.
    - helb 11y ago
      Seems about right, maybe my memory tricked me. Thanks.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
helb 11y ago
Author here. Thanks for your pull requests, I added some of the suggested services. Maybe some comparison table (like the one at Wikipedia) would be better than a simple list. About that help/helb confusion mentioned here – sorry about that, it's not intentional, it's just my nickname since 2nd grade or so.
cube00 11y ago
I like how you don't have an option to shut down your project to help clear those links from Google. Either you keep it up to date or SF will "step in" and do it for you.
- LLWM 11y ago
  That's the whole point of open source. If a developer abandons a project, someone else can pick it up and keep it going. And if you disagree with some of the developer's choices, you can fork the project and make your own version. Sourceforge is a great example of how someone evil can take advantage of the features of open source to do bad things.
  - grayclhn 11y ago
    I'd amend that to "someone evil who's built up a 'good' reputation for long enough that they dominate search rankings...." I don't know that what sourceforge is doing is a unique situation, but it's AFAIK not a common one. It's not going to have the same effect if I start bundling open source installers with malware and hosting them on my own, for example.
jimwalsh 11y ago
Ah the old days when Sourceforge and Freshmeat were some of the go to places for OSS when I was learning Linux in the 90s. Occasionally I'll end up back at SF somehow and man how terrible it has become. Makes you really appreciate places like Github now a days.
coherentpony 11y ago
What about mailing lists?
- david-given 11y ago
  This is the biggest issue for me --- project hosting is easy, mailing lists are not. Particularly, migrating people to the new list is going to be hard. I've been looking at Google Groups but it doesn't seem to support import, although it does support a nice web interface (good for people who expect forums). Does anyone have any recommendations?
  - helb 11y ago
    There were some suggestions in yesterday's thread – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9617824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9617824
helb 11y ago
So i changed the service list into a simple table. Also, Gitlab providers are listed separately. Any ideas for a domain name? :)
- sytse 11y ago
  gitalternatives.com is still available. By the way, thanks for including GitLab so prominently on your site. Any chance of including a column for free private repo's with unlimited collaborators? :)
AdamN 11y ago
I'm really surprised at how many people in this thread are Windows users frankly. I just presumed that most YC commenters were OS X/Linux people with a few FreeBSD, etc.. OSes floating around.
- bunderbunder 11y ago
  I'm really surprised you'd think it's standard for YCers to only use one operating system.
  - cgh 11y ago
    He mentioned three in his comment, not one.
- CWuestefeld 11y ago
  This is a tangent, but... Two nights ago I went to a "bleeding edge web" meetup. I was really struck by how universal, unspoken, and simply taken as a given it was that modern web development is done on a Unix box. Thus there was no room for any discussion about Windows alternatives, or even explanation for us third-worlders about what role certain tools - that at least I had never heard of - play in the ecosystem. I was completely alienated.
  - jackmaney 11y ago
    In my experience, some things that Just Work on *nix systems or OS X either plain don't work on Windows or kinda-sorta-work after you do a weird workaround. Not all things, certainly, but enough to be a massive pain in the ass. Unless you're coding for Windows only (eg C#, .Net, etc), Windows is the red-headed stepchild of development environments. I'm somewhat hopeful that this will start to change with the release of Windows 10.
- pmelendez 11y ago
  Some of us are OS agnostic and jumping around between several OSs everyday (Ubuntu, Win8.1, OSX in my case).
bougiefever 11y ago
GitHub has been the go-to online source control for so long, I'm sure no one will miss SF.
helb 11y ago
Someone posted it to Reddit, discussion here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/37pz5x/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/37pz5x/
Sleaker 11y ago
Whenever I've had to go to a sourceforge page to download software I always think, ugh I have to deal with this crap again? (UI, annoying redirects, can't find correct versions, etc) I honestly never understood why developers used the website for distributing binaries, I understand code hosting, but not the distribution (this was before they hijacked stuff). Hopefully, this will hit a chord with enough projects that they will altogether stop using sourceforge.
- vsl 11y ago
  10-15 years ago, there weren't that many other options.
jasonhansel 11y ago
Maybe GitHub should start mirroring Sourceforge projects :)

459 points by chris-at 11y ago

na85 11y ago

I find this state of affairs rather tragic. To see what was one of the pioneers of the global open-source movement reduced to such infamy.

wyclif 11y ago
Tragic, but I see no reason to shed any tears. Sites come and go, and when they change hands the new operators are often sleazy. Today we have Github. If they end up doing the same thing, there will be a new VCS site. Nerds won't tolerate crapware.
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  I remember when they were bought by VA (I think?), the same time as Slashdot changed hands I think. I remember signing up for an account years ago and having to use Putty and SSH keys to upload data which was revolutionary to FTP-aware me. There was an awful lot of software on there (who remembers visiting freshmeat.net to look for daily updates or search for software too????) but I think it would be sad to not realise how great it was that they offered free hosting and tools. They used to have a compile-farm that you could use to build software on different platforms and architectures but this got retired a long time ago. For the free tools you got, it wasn't bad! I think "nerds" are quick to forget that. It was FREE
  - precision 11y ago
    SourceForge wasn't bought by VA, it was started as a skunkworks projects by 4 developers inside of VA. Once the site started to get traction is when the corporate overlords started taking notice and forcing the horrible Ads, and now crapware onto the site.
Cthulhu_ 11y ago
TBF, the way I see it they only did the hosting and making the money; I don't remember them actively supporting open source or the ideals behind it, or being open source developers themselves and contributing, or making their own software open source. Having a revenue model that involves making your users guess which DOWNLOAD button will actually download the application is not the open source spirit.
- sanswork 11y ago
  The code running the site was original open source but they closed it a long time ago. Probably as part of one of the many buy outs over its history. GForge came from it.
- Nullabillity 11y ago
  AFAIK their website was originally open source, with GForge, FusionForge, and GNU's Savannah based on it. Then they had a longer stint staying closed, but they opened back up a couple of years ago, and their current software, Allura, is open source again, though (slightly ironically) now as part of Apache.
  - precision 11y ago
    The core developers behind it were always Open Source advocates.. but we were always at a war with the corporate overlords.
- hahamrfunnyguy 11y ago
  The guess the download crap appeared in the past 8-10 years. Before that the site was fairly trustworthy even though there was always ads and the like.

yAnonymous 11y ago

It's high time that SF lands on malware blocklists.

nekopa 11y ago

I was shocked the other day when I went to grab FileZilla from SF, and my virus scanner tagged it for malware. I hadn't realized it had fallen so far as to bundle crapware. SF used to be my goto site for looking for weird open source stuff. Now I guess I will have to finally take SF off my list goto sites. You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.

laurent123456 11y ago
It was FileZilla's developers who decided to bundle crapware with their installer on SF so can't really blame SF on this. See there: https://forum.filezilla-project.org/viewtopic.php?t=31127 https://forum.filezilla-project.org/viewtopic.php?t=31127 "This is by design. In any case, nothing is forced upon you, all offers are entirely optional and are only being displayed during setup."
- tonyedgecombe 11y ago
  I guess this is what happens when people aren't willing to pay for software, there are plenty of really good ftp clients out there for not very much money.
  - fapjacks 11y ago
    Exactly. Just look at all the software for Linux. :T
    - tonyedgecombe 11y ago
      Outside of developer tools the software landscape for Linux doesn't look that great.
      - tracker1 11y ago
        Well, Steam seems to be growing pretty nicely... Also, for most users a good Browser is all they need. Which is why I love Chromebooks as an option for most people.

eterm 11y ago

If I were a project manager who run a sourceforge account the last thing I would do now is abandon it. Why? Because SF have proven if I were to do so they'd take my work under my name and bundle their crap into it. The only way to stop that is to keep it active. That feeling of being trapped into a terrible system because it'll screw over people even worse if you leave.

Grue3 11y ago
GIMP-win owner actually did upload new binaries to SF account. There hasn't been a GIMP release for a while, but the SF repo was never abandoned. SF is blatantly lying about this. So no, not abandoning the account won't save you.
nudpiedo 11y ago
That's illegal (with the European laws).
- maaaats 11y ago
  Which laws?
netheril96 11y ago
Could the hypothetical you remove the project?
hrjet 11y ago
> they'd take my work under my name and bundle their crap into it. Oh, is that a thing? I was surprised when the Lobo project's admin rights were handed over to some relatively unknown developer. I had a long and confusing discussion with the new project admin here: https://github.com/UprootLabs/gngr/issues/87#issuecomment-86528159 https://github.com/UprootLabs/gngr/issues/87#issuecomment-86...

wldlyinaccurate 11y ago

I've found that Sourceforge is still the only place you can get a lot of good-but-unmaintained software. I was there just the other week for the Saxon project[1], and it was painful to see how low SF have sunk. I wonder if it would be possible (and legal) for somebody who isn't the project owner to copy some of these unmaintained projects into another system? [1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/saxon/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/saxon/

pan69 11y ago
I remembered Saxon being an Apache project, but it's not. I must have remembered wrong. Anyhow, it should be an Apache project. http://www.apache.org/#projects-list http://www.apache.org/#projects-list
- guard-of-terra 11y ago
  Xalan is Apache project so there will be redundancy. (I remember they had a dozen Java MVC frameworks 10 years ago tho)
  - pan69 11y ago
    I think I might have things mixed up with Xalan. It's been a long time since I used it...
- inimino 11y ago
  Saxon has a free version and an "enterprise" version, and the developer also operates a consulting business around it, so it's not a likely candidate for an Apache project.
imron 11y ago
The project is licensed under the MPL 2.0 (and 1.0) which states: Each Contributor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license ... to use, reproduce, make available, modify, display, perform, distribute, and otherwise exploit its Contributions, either on an unmodified basis, with Modifications, or as part of a Larger Work; So the answer (at least for Saxon) is yes! Just make sure you conform to the licence requirements and you're good to go.

laurent123456 11y ago

To be honest I can't say I have any good memory of Sourceforge. It used to a heavy website with a confusing UI, and never really got better over the years. When Google Code started, I was glad I could move to it, and then GitHub.

DanBC 11y ago
There was a time when it had just opened when it was a really useful place to get opensource software. The Usenet group alt.comp.freeware converted several people to the idea of open source by having links to sourceforge posted there.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
coldpie 11y ago
Yeah. I started getting involved with OSS in the mid-00s. I suspect SourceForge's heyday was before that. So SF has always been a slightly shady repository of software in my view, though the adware bundling is a new low.
jcd748 11y ago
In the late 90s, Sourceforge (and Freshmeat) were really good places to get software. But even in the early 00s, it felt dusty and dated.
danellis 11y ago
Yeah, they always had a horribly confusing UI that made it non-obvious how to get to a project's homepage, even -- the thing that should be front and centre! However, I did enjoy playing around with their compile farm when they had that. Think it only lasted a couple of years, though.
cmrdporcupine 11y ago
Yeah I don't get this "SourceForge, once a trustworthy source code hosting site" -- that is simply untrue. Maybe for the 1st year or two after its launch, but it has been subject to all sorts of crappy management since at least 1999/2000. I used to have projects there, and contribute to projects there (argh memories of terrible CVS) and it was always slow, always had a terrible UI, and very early in its history became submerged in bad ads and out-links to bad content. It should just die.

frik 11y ago

Can Archive.org/etc backup all the open source projects from Sourceforge.org and Google Code? It would be a big loss if the unmaintained but often still very useful source code get lost forever.

anc84 11y ago
There is some work being done by the (unaffiliated) Archiveteam to do that, see http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=SourceForge http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=SourceForge and http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Talk:SourceForge http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Talk:SourceForge Help if you can, it's fun! #archiveteam on EFNet.
fishbacon 11y ago
It looks like ArchiveTeam[1] already has a lot of SF archived. [1]http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=SourceForge http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=SourceForge

tempodox 11y ago

I still land on SF now and then, to download sources that are hosted there. But that only happens because another site's “Download” button sent me there. In the beginning I was very impressed with SF. But as others have said, the UI is rather confusing and those ads they've been showing would devalue any site they run on to “lower-tier crap you need rubber gloves for”. A sad development.

jongalloway2 11y ago

If you're downloading open source software on Windows, friendly reminder to get it via Chocolatey rather than ever clicking on a download button. Chocolatey has reviewed, silent, direct, crapware free downloads of just about anything you'd want. https://chocolatey.org/packages https://chocolatey.org/packages

raesene9 11y ago
Not too sure you can rely on Chocolatey to be direct..? Last time I installed WinDirStat using Chocolatey it got the install file from Sourceforge (over an unencrypted HTTP connection) http://imgur.com/fajFMUA http://imgur.com/fajFMUA
- jongalloway2 11y ago
  It links to official installers which are sometimes on SourceForge, but uses installer switches to set options to deselect crapware, do silent install, etc.
adam12 11y ago
Ninite is pretty slick and crapware free. https://ninite.com/ https://ninite.com/ I can't wait for the new package manager in Windows 10, though.
- raesene9 11y ago
  It would be cool to have a Windows "official" package manager, however I don't think their initial launch is going to be that. From what I understand, it's more of a "package manager-manager" so it manages other systems (like Chocolatey) rather than running the repos itself.
  - chebum 11y ago
    There is Windows Marketplace for that.

imron 11y ago

I still have a project hosted on Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pinyinput/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/pinyinput/). They haven't injected their own installer on downloads so for the time being I leave it there because I'm too lazy to move it off. A while back I did move the main project page to its own domain, so I'm only really using Sourceforge for downloads and source control (although the project is stable and hasn't had commits for a long time so not even that really).

xrstf 11y ago

For a second there, I thought this was an official GitHub page and thought "Wow, those GitHub guys really have balls to attack SF that directly". But then I realized it is "helb" and not "help" in the URL.

helb 11y ago
Author here. Sorry about that confusion, i probably should host it elsewhere… Help/helb is not intentional, it's just my nickname since 2nd grade or so.
- sounds 11y ago
  You have a disclaimer at the bottom of the page. I was also confused by the help/helb thing until I saw the disclaimer.
yaph 11y ago
Wonder how many others thought exactly the same, I did too.
- specto 11y ago
  I assumed it wasn't, but I hoped
- helb 11y ago
  Sorry about that… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9624068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9624068
jotm 11y ago
They don't have to say anything when their users do it for them :-)
espadrine 11y ago
I think that was part of the reason to switch from github.com to github.io a while back. Their .io is user content and can be downgraded by Google independently from github.com.

fapjacks 11y ago

Well, to be honest, this is exactly where Sourceforge has been headed for years and years. You could look at its behavior years ago and say "Yeah, follow this out on a line" and see this exact situation in the crystal ball. Sourceforge has been scummy (and getting scummier) for years and years.

tracker1 11y ago
I remember actually keeping a couple of service accounts on services that served as mirrors for SF for years just because they backed the service (early on, before a lot of the sleazy stuff started). Unfortunately, short of registering a trademark with the PTO, it'd be difficult to get a lot of this crapware removed from SF.

jsingleton 11y ago

Perhaps it is worth asking the mirror services to put some pressure on as well as the content creators? These are two popular mirrors in the UK & Ireland (both academic institutions): http://www.mirrorservice.org/ http://www.mirrorservice.org/ (University of Kent) http://ftp.heanet.ie/ http://ftp.heanet.ie/ (Ireland’s National Education and Research Network)

zokier 11y ago
I agree that this would be the best recourse if we could manage to muster some sort of coordinated exodus of mirrors. Mirror providers have at least some sort of power over SF due the service they are providing, something that project authors do not have. Many of the mirrors I think are academic and I don't think they too happy about SF being such leech that they are.
frik 11y ago
As Github.com lacks afaik a binary hosting / download feature and Google Code closed its service (no new projects) - it would be great if all the Sourceforge mirrors (heanet, etc.) would be coordinated from an open source community instead of coordinated by Sourceforge.org. There is definitely a need for a binary hosting and mailing list website for open source projects, to fill the hole that Sourceforge may leave behind. I remember the "BerliOS" from a Germany's Fraunhofer institute that was a kind of clone of Sourceforge, a open source project hosting service. It was closed in 2013 and some valuable code and binaries are lost forever.
- pierrec 11y ago
  Github does have a pretty good binary hosting / download feature, it's called Releases. There's even an API to automate it. It's not very widely used, perhaps because it only rolled out it 2013. About Releases: https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software An example: https://github.com/adobe/brackets/releases/ https://github.com/adobe/brackets/releases/ As for mailing lists, I guess their excuse is that they already provide possibilities for discussion in the issue tracker (which can be also interacted with entirely by mail). This is appropriate as a forum for developers - but not a forum for users, which would be out of Github's scope, IMO.

eps 11y ago

What's unsettling about this is that Slashdot also belongs to the same company that turned SF into the crapware distributor that it is now.

dredmorbius 11y ago
Slashdot split from Thinkgeek a few years back.
- simoncion 11y ago
  Both Slashdot and SourceForge are currently owned by the company that owns Dice.com.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    Good point. Thanks. I'd thought Collab.net ended up with them. Need to review the history.
    - dbellizzi 11y ago
      Collab ended up with the business version, SourceForge Enterprise Edition (SFEE), which was a Java rewrite of sourceforge.net shipped as installed software.
flyinghamster 11y ago
Not only that, but a quick search for GIMP on Slashdot turns up absolutely no discussion about the hijack. There was an <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/11/07/2328228/gimp-citing-ad-policies-moves-to-ftp-rather-than-sourceforge-downloads">article http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/11/07/2328228/gimp-citing-a... in 2013 that GIMP was moving</a>, and <a href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/11/14/2036200/sourceforge-appeals-to-readers-for-help-nixing-bad-ad-actors">another http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/11/14/2036200/source... a week later</a> about SF's ad policies (LOL!), but absolutely nothing from this week. Color me unsurprised. I knew /. was heading downhill, but this is the final nail in the coffin.

wyldfire 11y ago

Guilt by association? Perhaps SF is not the true source of badness/malware but instead they tend to host the projects most likely to include such malware.

connor4312 11y ago
No, they definitely are... http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/sourceforge-grabs-gimp-for-windows-account-wraps-installer-in-bundle-pushing-adware/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/source...
- wyldfire 11y ago
  Tsk, that's pretty damning.
abritishguy 11y ago
SF takes over abandoned projects and ads the adware themselves.

bnferguson 11y ago

May be worth noting that GitHub supports SVN as well (https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clients/ https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clie...), I believe some of the others do as well IIRC. May be important to some legacy projects trying to get off of SF.

amyjess 11y ago
If they also added a Mercurial bridge, that would be the final nail in SF's coffin. It's sad that with Google Code going away, a lot of projects that chose Google Code for Mercurial are being pushed to switch to git (e.g. vim) because Google is pushing so hard for projects to be migrated to GitHub,

patio11 11y ago

Sourceforge is essentially a gigantic set of Google doorway pages which MITM downloads initiated by unsuspecting (largely non-technical) Internet users of popular free-as-in-beer projects. They're open about doing this. https://sourceforge.net/blog/gimp-win-project-wasnt-hijacked-just-abandoned/ https://sourceforge.net/blog/gimp-win-project-wasnt-hijacked... These "mirror" (MITM) pages outrank the authoritative sites for many projects because Sourceforge has been around for 10+ years and has superior trust/backlink profiles compared to the newer author-blessed sites which presently host the software. Gimp is actually fortunate in this regard -- gimp.org is stickied to the top spot when searching [gimp] and Sourceforge floats around #8 or so. Sourceforge should get hit with Google's standard penalty, which is "we smite your rankings with the hammer of an avenging god." Minimally, Google should at least tighten up their enforcement of AdWords policies. Their "installers" are per-se violations of the Unwanted Software Policy (http://www.google.com/about/company/unwanted-software-policy.html?hl=en http://www.google.com/about/company/unwanted-software-policy...). How about it, resident Googlers?

stfnppv 11y ago
There you go. https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/ https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/
- dordoka 11y ago
  Reported
- Ueland 11y ago
  Thank you, also reported the site now.
- joshrivers 11y ago
  Reported
- gauravphoenix 11y ago
  Reported. If you report, please provide some reason. I provided- "embeds malware/adware with downloads"

billsix 11y ago

I like that they open-sourced their engine. https://allura.apache.org/ https://allura.apache.org/

moron4hire 11y ago

>> SourceForge, once a trustworthy source code hosting site... No, SourceForge was always sleazy.

helb 11y ago
It wasn't in 90s and early 00s… Along with Freshmeat (and The Linux Game Tome :)), they were pretty useful websites.
- moron4hire 11y ago
  Wikipedia says SourceForge launched November of 1999. I remember as early as 2003 thinking it was sleazy how it tried to trick you into downloading adware with their big "Download Now!" ads. So maybe not literally "always", but certainly the majority of time.
  - helb 11y ago
    Seems about right, maybe my memory tricked me. Thanks.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

helb 11y ago

Author here. Thanks for your pull requests, I added some of the suggested services. Maybe some comparison table (like the one at Wikipedia) would be better than a simple list. About that help/helb confusion mentioned here – sorry about that, it's not intentional, it's just my nickname since 2nd grade or so.

cube00 11y ago

I like how you don't have an option to shut down your project to help clear those links from Google. Either you keep it up to date or SF will "step in" and do it for you.

LLWM 11y ago
That's the whole point of open source. If a developer abandons a project, someone else can pick it up and keep it going. And if you disagree with some of the developer's choices, you can fork the project and make your own version. Sourceforge is a great example of how someone evil can take advantage of the features of open source to do bad things.
- grayclhn 11y ago
  I'd amend that to "someone evil who's built up a 'good' reputation for long enough that they dominate search rankings...." I don't know that what sourceforge is doing is a unique situation, but it's AFAIK not a common one. It's not going to have the same effect if I start bundling open source installers with malware and hosting them on my own, for example.

jimwalsh 11y ago

Ah the old days when Sourceforge and Freshmeat were some of the go to places for OSS when I was learning Linux in the 90s. Occasionally I'll end up back at SF somehow and man how terrible it has become. Makes you really appreciate places like Github now a days.

coherentpony 11y ago

What about mailing lists?

david-given 11y ago
This is the biggest issue for me --- project hosting is easy, mailing lists are not. Particularly, migrating people to the new list is going to be hard. I've been looking at Google Groups but it doesn't seem to support import, although it does support a nice web interface (good for people who expect forums). Does anyone have any recommendations?
- helb 11y ago
  There were some suggestions in yesterday's thread – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9617824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9617824

helb 11y ago

So i changed the service list into a simple table. Also, Gitlab providers are listed separately. Any ideas for a domain name? :)

sytse 11y ago
gitalternatives.com is still available. By the way, thanks for including GitLab so prominently on your site. Any chance of including a column for free private repo's with unlimited collaborators? :)

AdamN 11y ago

I'm really surprised at how many people in this thread are Windows users frankly. I just presumed that most YC commenters were OS X/Linux people with a few FreeBSD, etc.. OSes floating around.

bunderbunder 11y ago
I'm really surprised you'd think it's standard for YCers to only use one operating system.
- cgh 11y ago
  He mentioned three in his comment, not one.
CWuestefeld 11y ago
This is a tangent, but... Two nights ago I went to a "bleeding edge web" meetup. I was really struck by how universal, unspoken, and simply taken as a given it was that modern web development is done on a Unix box. Thus there was no room for any discussion about Windows alternatives, or even explanation for us third-worlders about what role certain tools - that at least I had never heard of - play in the ecosystem. I was completely alienated.
- jackmaney 11y ago
  In my experience, some things that Just Work on *nix systems or OS X either plain don't work on Windows or kinda-sorta-work after you do a weird workaround. Not all things, certainly, but enough to be a massive pain in the ass. Unless you're coding for Windows only (eg C#, .Net, etc), Windows is the red-headed stepchild of development environments. I'm somewhat hopeful that this will start to change with the release of Windows 10.
pmelendez 11y ago
Some of us are OS agnostic and jumping around between several OSs everyday (Ubuntu, Win8.1, OSX in my case).

bougiefever 11y ago

GitHub has been the go-to online source control for so long, I'm sure no one will miss SF.

helb 11y ago

Someone posted it to Reddit, discussion here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/37pz5x/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/37pz5x/

Sleaker 11y ago

Whenever I've had to go to a sourceforge page to download software I always think, ugh I have to deal with this crap again? (UI, annoying redirects, can't find correct versions, etc) I honestly never understood why developers used the website for distributing binaries, I understand code hosting, but not the distribution (this was before they hijacked stuff). Hopefully, this will hit a chord with enough projects that they will altogether stop using sourceforge.

vsl 11y ago
10-15 years ago, there weren't that many other options.

jasonhansel 11y ago

Maybe GitHub should start mirroring Sourceforge projects :)