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DHI Group Plans to Sell Slashdot and SourceForge
- vortico 11y agoI'll take both for $9.99.
- ExpiredLink 11y agoIf done right a SourceForge relaunch could be a success. A practical alternative to the GitHub monopoly would be appreciated.
- xvilka 11y agoThere are already at least two biggest practical alternatives to the GitHub - BitBucket and GitLab.
- sytse 11y agoAnything you're missing from GitLab.com? We have free private repo's and it is primarily based on open source (like SF).
- tomp 11y agoI just found out about GitLab today. I was pleasantly surprised! The only complaints I have: (1) GitHub has IMO a better landing page for projects, showing both files and a readme; (2) Personally, I prefer GitHub's layout (more white space), it's definitely better for reading, although your menu-on-the-right layout is probably better for navigation and management, and (3) I couldn't find an example of a Wiki. All in all, a great project, I'll probably be using it soon. Good work, and good luck with it! Also, do you clarify anywhere what's your approach to controversial projects - like "retards", PopcornTime and C+= - would they be allowed on site or taken down? Edit: never mind the last question, apparently you censored the GamergateOP repository, I guess that answers it.
- sytse 11y agoThanks! 1. The files + readme is something we considered but we choose to show an overview of the project and the readme, we think this is cleaner. You can configure to see the activity feed instead of the readme if you mostly use the same projects (in a company for example). See https://about.gitlab.com/2015/07/22/gitlab-7-13-released/ https://about.gitlab.com/2015/07/22/gitlab-7-13-released/ But what we learned so far that there are no perfect choices for the homepage. 2. I think you mean our menu-on-the-left layout? 3. We do have wiki's, for example see https://gitlab.maikel.pro/maikeldus/WhatsSpy-Public/wikis/home https://gitlab.maikel.pro/maikeldus/WhatsSpy-Public/wikis/ho... Great to hear you'll be using it soon. We have one button importers for most platforms. Regarding the controversy please see my comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9967545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9967545
- tomp 11y ago2 - Yes. Re: controversy - ok, so the same as GitHub or Reddit, you just arbitrarily choose what to take down and when. In particular, this leaves all repositories open to media-induced attention and controversy, followed by a takedown. IMO, having an explicit, well-defined policy would be much better, even if it's highly restrictive, as long as it's objective (i.e. no "offended" and similar) and changes aren't applied retroactively. I agree that being open source helps, and I thank you for that, but I still wish there was a hosted site with a large community safe from censorship.
- sytse 11y agoI would love an "explicit, well-defined policy". And I'm pretty sure Reddit would love one too. But it is hard to make one, do you have any examples of policies you like? It usually is hard to pin it down (I know it when I see it).
- tomp 11y agoIronically, the rules of reddit [1] are IMO pretty good guidelines. A code/document-hosting website would probably also want to specify something like "nothing illegal", to avoid DMCA/piracy/copyright issues. Obviously, reddit doesn't abide by it's own rules. That would require balls of steel (or equivalent for corporations), especially in the face of controversies such as The Fappening.
- sgrove 11y agoSeems like whoever picks up SF should at least consider converting it into a GitLab OSS installation!
- sytse 11y agoHa, that would be awesome!
- Grue3 11y agoSourceforge's strength (theoretically) is binary downloads distributed over a large network of mirrors. None of Github alternatives currently provide this.
- sytse 11y agoGood point, we're accepting merge requests for this with GitLab http://feedback.gitlab.com/forums/176466-general/suggestions/4156755-releases-with-binary-files-like-on-github http://feedback.gitlab.com/forums/176466-general/suggestions... and people have modified GitLab to offer distributed downloads, but indeed nothing is in the main product, except for support for Git Annex with GitLab EE.
- david-given 11y agoMailing lists? That's the one thing on SourceForge that I'm having trouble migrating elsewhere.
- sytse 11y agoGood point BTW I've heard good things about https://www.phplist.com/ https://www.phplist.com/
- chei0aiV 11y agoMake it work without JavaScript: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement
- sytse 11y agoThat would be nice but it isn't easy. GitLab is something people use heavily every day so I assume most run it with Javascript to get the speedup. But we're open to contributions for this.
- rlpb 11y agoLaunchpad has git support now. Anything else it's missing?
- GordonS 11y agoThe way sourceforge has gone down the toilet, they'd* have to pay me to take it of their hands!
- Turing_Machine 11y agoRight. I wouldn't want my name associated with that operation.
- lfowles 11y agoI'll raise to $yearly-cost-of-domain-names
- jacquesm 11y agoSourceforge could very well be a liability.
- s73v3r 11y agoPut a big "UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT!" sign on the site, and don't be a dickbag.
- why_tho 11y agoSometimes, I really have to wonder about the exact machanisms involved, whereby one company sells out a thriving community to some other souless marketing goons, and everyone on the outside of the deal knows that the magic is over, and the aftermath will end poorly, but the buyer still seems to believe that "touching things" isn't the exact sort of behavior that will destroy the thing they paid so much for, thus rendering it unprofitable, and unwittingly destroying even their own desired goals.
- reustle 11y agoI would love to see some of the numbers after a sale happens. At the end of the day, how much was the profit of the whole endeavor?
- ExpiredLink 11y agoIt's called the greater fool theory.
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y agoYour description sounds very similar to the situation I lived when the (very small) company I worked for was sold to a group of investors who knew nothing about the industry. Suffice to say that the experience over the next few years was so surreal that most people I told it to have difficulty believing anyone could so accurately and repeatedly shoot themselves in the foot without learning anything from the pain. So what main mechanism was involved? At the time I was young and cocky so I would have said "basic stupidity." With greater experience, I can see it was more nuanced than that, so let's call it management hubris.
- fixermark 11y agoThe game industry is like this. There've been multiple occasions where a larger publisher bought a studio, only to find that the top-tier talent leave to found their own studio and the publisher is left with successful (but short-lived) licenses but no talent pool to build new golden eggs. Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang may be the exception that proves the rule; while Notch is no longer involved in Minecraft, the project itself has reached a critical mass where it very well might make as much on licensing and deals as it does on new users now (and with a healthy modding community on the PC version, it's an open sandbox that children can "grow into" as they learn more about how computers work). I think the way they'd kill that is to close off the avenues to modding the game; time will tell if Microsoft is that foolish, but I sincerely doubt they would be.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- taspeotis 11y agoVisual Studio Online is slowly edging towards feature parity with GitHub, although I'm not sure whether that's intentional or coincidence. If Microsoft did want to compete in that "social coding" space and not just enterprise ALM, purchasing SourceForge to "seed" VSO with a bunch of (semi-)active repositories wouldn't be out of the question, would it?
- bhouston 11y agoThe potential backlash to VSO likely isn't worth it -- but maybe there is a way to politically navigate that.
- pygy_ 11y agoRegarding SF, That's their only chance to save the brand and the site. At this point, the current owner can't be trusted anymore.
- njharman 11y agoThe site was lost long ago. Enforcing a brand on it is one of the things that caused it to become lost. It was a developer tool. Developers want things to work, fairly, reliably, transparently and ideally with (technical) elegance.
- kethinov 11y agoI really hope someone can turnaround Slashdot. To this day I find it to have the highest quality discussion threads on average out of any tech news site, largely due to its very mature community and quirky but effective moderation system. I've moderated on Slashdot for years and watched as the site's original low tech but functional UX has been degraded by half-hearted attempts to make it a modern web application. There was a time when Slashcode was considered to be one of the best open source comment systems you could set up for your own website. I think above all else, the Slashdot team should start shooting for that again. Build something with a UI that blows Disqus and reddit out of the water, continue to use the Slashdot-style moderation system (with possibly some tweaks to improve it), open source it, and be relevant again.
- muraiki 11y agoI also greatly liked the Slashdot moderation system. But I left slash for HN because I was sick of editorializing in the summary, along with completely inaccurate summaries unchecked by the editors. Sometimes I wish HN had support for small summaries under the article titles, but then I realize that at least this way I don't have to deal with the above two problems!
- kethinov 11y agoI remain active on both (along with reddit and Ars Technica too). I see value in each community's ways of doing things, and it doesn't bother me one bit that Slashdot's editors have bias, so long as they're transparent about it when posting opinions which tends to be the case.
- muraiki 11y agoYeah, I realize that bias is impossible to completely eliminate. The greater reason for me was consistently coming across summaries that were inaccurate and an editor failed to correct it before posting. This was also a number of years ago, so I don't know what things are like there now.
- VLM 11y ago
- jacquesm 11y agoI wouldn't give $50 for sourceforge at this point. They're a liability, not an asset.
- sjg007 11y agoI started with Slashdot, then went to reddit and now hacker news.. Wonder if it can have a redux.