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1. What is the alternative for user facing open source projects? The icentives for GitHub are even more misaligned as they want to attract developers and not us

by tobias3 11y ago

1. What is the alternative for user facing open source projects? The icentives for GitHub are even more misaligned as they want to attract developers and not users. I am wondering how long it takes till they shut down their binary release feature again, once everyone puts their binary releases there. 2. It gave you all the stuff you needed for your project at one place. The SCM of your choice, mailing lists, hosted forums, wiki, bugtracker, and a website with PHP/MySQL. They have retired hosted forums, wiki and bugtracker now. 3. It increases the discoverability of your project. The project summary page actually gives a nice overview of the main points of your project such as licence, category and features; They have things like project of the month, etc.. Without sourceforge (and freecode) we are at SEO, social media and word of mouth for open source PR. This is much more effort. 4. They allow huge binary downloads which can be uploaded with e.g. rsync and scp. Loosing all this might be fine for a large project such as GIMP, as they have the manpower and donation money to do it themselves. For smaller projects this distracts from developing the project.

seba_dos1 11y ago
While what you say might be true, when I want to download some project and find out that it's hosted on SourceForge, my first thought is "oh crap, it's probably outdated and unmaintained". The second one is "I'll better check again, maybe they migrated somewhere else". I don't trust SourceForge anymore like I used to in the past. Stuff like taking over old projects and adding adware to them definitely don't help, but even ignoring that SourceForge still feels dead.
ctvo 11y ago
I appreciate the clarification. The take away for me is that Sourceforge was a distribution as well as a management platform for open source projects. The distribution part differentiating it from other project hosting sites.
- rjsw 11y ago
  Sourceforge isn't providing most of the distribution infrastructure, you usually download tarballs from mirror sites, you only connect to sf.net itself if you want to use the SCM system for a given project.
moonchrome 11y ago
>1. What is the alternative for user facing open source projects? The icentives for GitHub are even more misaligned as they want to attract developers and not users. I am wondering how long it takes till they shut down their binary release feature again, once everyone puts their binary releases there. At this point I have to wonder - why not have a paid download service for OSS builds - like 1-2$ or whatever symbolic price minimum - this will probably cover the download costs and maybe leave your project some tiny bit of cash. At the same time provide a free build link on torrents so that your users can access it trough torrents if they don't want to pay - it doesn't cost you anything (even the bandwidth if your project is hosted on something like GH pages). So you pay 1-2$ for convenience or go download trough torrents or if you can't use torrents and you're brave search google for mirrors.
- JohnTHaller 11y ago
  The simple answer is that 98% of users won't pay it. Source: I manage an open source project used by a few million people.
  - moonchrome 11y ago
    But I'm not saying provide free download as an alternative - I'm saying provide binaries only with the 1/2$ fee - if the person doesn't want to pay they still have the torrents and the source. For example if github provided this service instead of binary releases - you would receive say 50% of the income they keep 50% for bandwidth/service. If the person uses alternative means than you're not spending resources anyway.
  - espadrine 11y ago
    98% seems like a very generous user-base. Getting 20k$ from the 2% in your million users would maintain the download server for at least twenty years. I assume it's much lower than 2%, which would fit my experience. From about a thousand users (a conservative estimate), I get around 10m$/user on average, and 0.3% of paying users.
    - 11y ago

by tobias3 11y ago

seba_dos1 11y ago

While what you say might be true, when I want to download some project and find out that it's hosted on SourceForge, my first thought is "oh crap, it's probably outdated and unmaintained". The second one is "I'll better check again, maybe they migrated somewhere else". I don't trust SourceForge anymore like I used to in the past. Stuff like taking over old projects and adding adware to them definitely don't help, but even ignoring that SourceForge still feels dead.

ctvo 11y ago

I appreciate the clarification. The take away for me is that Sourceforge was a distribution as well as a management platform for open source projects. The distribution part differentiating it from other project hosting sites.

rjsw 11y ago
Sourceforge isn't providing most of the distribution infrastructure, you usually download tarballs from mirror sites, you only connect to sf.net itself if you want to use the SCM system for a given project.

moonchrome 11y ago

>1. What is the alternative for user facing open source projects? The icentives for GitHub are even more misaligned as they want to attract developers and not users. I am wondering how long it takes till they shut down their binary release feature again, once everyone puts their binary releases there. At this point I have to wonder - why not have a paid download service for OSS builds - like 1-2$ or whatever symbolic price minimum - this will probably cover the download costs and maybe leave your project some tiny bit of cash. At the same time provide a free build link on torrents so that your users can access it trough torrents if they don't want to pay - it doesn't cost you anything (even the bandwidth if your project is hosted on something like GH pages). So you pay 1-2$ for convenience or go download trough torrents or if you can't use torrents and you're brave search google for mirrors.

JohnTHaller 11y ago
The simple answer is that 98% of users won't pay it. Source: I manage an open source project used by a few million people.
- moonchrome 11y ago
  But I'm not saying provide free download as an alternative - I'm saying provide binaries only with the 1/2$ fee - if the person doesn't want to pay they still have the torrents and the source. For example if github provided this service instead of binary releases - you would receive say 50% of the income they keep 50% for bandwidth/service. If the person uses alternative means than you're not spending resources anyway.
- espadrine 11y ago
  98% seems like a very generous user-base. Getting 20k$ from the 2% in your million users would maintain the download server for at least twenty years. I assume it's much lower than 2%, which would fit my experience. From about a thousand users (a conservative estimate), I get around 10m$/user on average, and 0.3% of paying users.
  - 11y ago