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A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future

sourceforge.net

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Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future

#21

Post by rhabarba »

bachmeier wrote: post #20

If SF wants to attract developers, they should support alternative version control systems like fossil and darcs. I can't think of any reason to use SF for a new project except possibly that you use mercurial and don't like bitbucket. The market for git hosting is extremely competitive and they don't bring much to the table.

They also have SVN. There are not many SVN hosters left. A good competitor for Darcshub would be appreciated though.

Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future

#22

Post by paulie_a »

Sourceforge is something I used extensively, they burned their reputation. I don't care about new management or new owners. I will never use their site again. When I find a package or library that is available only hosted there, I look for an alternative. That is how bad their reputation is.

Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future

#23

Post by dbasedweeb »

rhabarba wrote: post #19
DuskStar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're employed somewhere, you have responsibilities. Otherwise what's the point?

If I'm a mere employee, my chance to decide about what happens around me (or on my employer's website) might be limited.

I’m a mere consumer, and my only option in reaction to the abdication of personal responsibility is to never use the product again.

Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future

#24

Post by zzzeek »

who even owns sourceforge now? it's like coming across an antique toy, who knows how many garage sales and antique stores it must have been living in over the decades - a quick google reminds me it's been at least owned by VA Software, Geeknet, Dice.com (!) and now apparently some company called BIZX. from a usability standpoint, including the release process, the mailing list, and everything else, the site was always of course awful, which wasn't so unreasonable in 2002 but as the years and owners went by it just got worse and worse. Along with the ads/malware, I took issue with it's silly practice that you could never delete a project from it, because that would somehow be denying the fact that you've promised your project is open source. Never mind this means if you wanted to move to some other platform that an ancient fossilized version of your code would stay on Sourceforge forever and confuse users who were unfortunate to find it there first.

Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future

#27

Post by rhizome »

ahmedalsudani wrote: post #4

History of SourceForge according to me: - forced users to look at ads and go through two steps in order to download projects - when that was not enough, injected malware into the files users were downloading - irrecoverably lost project information I don’t think they can do anything to salvage their image at this point. The last incident didn’t even inflict too much damage because there wasn’t much left to SourceForg…

Sometimes when things get broken, they're broken forever.

Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future

#28

Post by Lazare »

Personally, I feel that the SourceForge brand has negative value right now. For me they burnt almost all of their goodwill during their long, long period of neglect and stagnation, then went sharply negative when they started distributing malware.

I'm willing to give the new team the benefit of the doubt; let's just assume they want to create a high quality product. That's great, but I think the first step is starting over with a non-tainted brand.

It may make sense to migrate existing projects and accounts across, or even to build on top of the existing code base, just don't call it SourceForge.

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