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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

#41

Post by _9vpl »

Lazare wrote: post #28

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 startin…

Completely agree. Sourceforge, the brand, is so tainted I can’t even read this on my phone, since a content blocker List I have installed has apparently blocked the entire domain. The brand has been shit in my own mind for a while. Not even going to bother reading this. Why does it still exist? Replaced by GitHub, Bitbucket, and Gitlab.

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

#42

Post by _9vpl »

mmanfrin wrote: post #11

To me, this is just another website. There is no history, that was burned when it became an enormous cash grab. I understand they've been making a lot of changes, but if they want tabula rasa, then they have it -- and they have to offer something that entices people to use the product, not rely on the name they inherited.

As someone else already pointed out, I don’t think they’ll be able to rely on the name as it’s been severely tarnished beyond repair. They’ll have to rely on something that is significantly better than what the GitHubs, Bitbuckets, and Gitlabs are offering.

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

#44

Post by macspoofing »

lokedhs wrote: post #32
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…

Many years ago me and a friend wrote an open source game and we hosted the project on Sourceforge. This was some time in the late 90's. The project got dropped as so many others do because both of us found more interesting things to do. Now, if you were in this situation and you decided to come back to the old project a few years later (we're now in the early 2000's) wouldn't you expect to be able to continue where y…

>Now, if you were in this situation and you decided to come back to the old project a few years later (we're now in the early 2000's) wouldn't you expect to be able to continue where you left off?

That's unfair. Back then, storage was expensive, backups were expensive, bandwidth was expensive, server CPU time was expensive. You can't fault them for removing unsupported projects in an era when Microsoft and Yahoo were only giving you 10MB of email storage (you might get an extra 15MB for $10/mo) and similarly aggressive purge policies.

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

#45

Post by fuball63 »

I've used SourceForge for a while for my hobbyist game development. I've never had a problem with them product wise; their tools work well and they're really making solid progress on the redesign.

The malware incident was really bad, but I'm surprised more people won't give them a look given the fact it is new ownership and a much smaller team.

What's strange, to me, is that last week there was a thread with a majority of commenters defending Microsoft and their new attitude towards open source, when Microsoft has been making terrible products whilst being hostile to developers and consumers alike for decades (just my opinion).

Everyone has different grudges for different reasons, I guess. It's a tough and complex problem as a business.

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

#46

Post by senozhatsky »

_9vpl wrote: post #41
Lazare wrote: post #28

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 startin…

Completely agree. Sourceforge, the brand, is so tainted I can’t even read this on my phone, since a content blocker List I have installed has apparently blocked the entire domain. The brand has been shit in my own mind for a while. Not even going to bother reading this. Why does it still exist? Replaced by GitHub, Bitbucket, and Gitlab.

> Why does it still exist?

Well, we are using Sourceforge... For one particular reason - free mailing list [for our open source project]. The code is on GitHub, but we want to do things the "old way" - send a patch to the mailing list, let people review it.

-ss

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

#47

Post by nerdponx »

fuball63 wrote: post #45

I've used SourceForge for a while for my hobbyist game development. I've never had a problem with them product wise; their tools work well and they're really making solid progress on the redesign. The malware incident was really bad, but I'm surprised more people won't give them a look given the fact it is new ownership and a much smaller team. What's strange, to me, is that last week there was a thread with a majori…

Well, the UI still sucks. They still have their weird download mirror page that reminds me of filesharing sites like RapidShare and Megaupload. So there's that. It doesn't exactly engender trust.

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

#48

Post by DougMerritt »

_9vpl wrote: post #41
Lazare wrote: post #28

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 startin…

Completely agree. Sourceforge, the brand, is so tainted I can’t even read this on my phone, since a content blocker List I have installed has apparently blocked the entire domain. The brand has been shit in my own mind for a while. Not even going to bother reading this. Why does it still exist? Replaced by GitHub, Bitbucket, and Gitlab.

There's still old source code on Sourceforge that hasn't been moved elsewhere.

Some of that is 100% stagnant, some of that is lightly maintained with a bug fix once every few years, and a little of it is somewhat actively maintained.

I always thought that Freshmeat, while not a hosting site and therefore not comparable, was an ok brand, and didn't necessarily have to go inactive, even though, yes, it couldn't keep up with everything. It could've continued to play some interesting role.

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

#49

Post by askmike »

deevolution wrote: post #43

I dont see any reason for this to still exist now that git is a thing... all github would have to do is make their release pages a bit more friendly to non devs and it would demolish sourceforge completely.

I don't think developers would ever pick SF because of how user friendly the release page looks.
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