Sourceforge was briefly free software, proprietary, unpopular and then now kinda-free but nobody trusts them.
A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
51–60 of 76 posts
Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#52I'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…
> defending Microsoft and their new attitude towards open source
What’s odd about that? Isn’t their new attitude better than the old, and perhaps “good enough” (at least compared to other giants)? Are you saying nothing they do should be considered good enough by devs, based on the previous history?
Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#53Personally, 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…
At this point would even a rebrand matter? Github has such an unspoken strong hold on the developer community that I find it hard to believe that SF will be able to make any dent at all. Github has at least been a respectable stakeholder in the whole process. No shady downloads, ads or stepping over the users in any way. The worst they did was not developing features that would have helped simplify open source development and even that was largely addressed when "Dear Github" rolled around. Even Gitlab and Bitbucket, which are far better products than SF ever was, have not been able to shake GH. Lastly, every package manager developed in the last decade has millions of its packages with repos pointing to GH. If GH shuts down open repos, npm would probably fold up overnight.
Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#54who 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 alway…
> who even owns sourceforge now?
http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/bizx-subsidiary-sou...
Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#55Personally, 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…
At this point would even a rebrand matter? Github has such an unspoken strong hold on the developer community that I find it hard to believe that SF will be able to make any dent at all. Github has at least been a respectable stakeholder in the whole process. No shady downloads, ads or stepping over the users in any way. The worst they did was not developing features that would have helped simplify open source develo…
You raise some very valid arguments, but every powerful incumbent seems unstoppable right until they're stopped. The same case for why you shouldn't compete with Github now applied to, eg, MySpace. No product is eternal; someday Github will fade and be replaced, and we'll be having a discussion about how pointless to compete with their successor is instead. :)
...that being said, I don't think SourceForge is the product to supplant Github. But I think that says more about SourceForge that it does Github.
Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#56In the late 90s, I was part of a project, which later became a non-profit called Tux.org, who was trying to be an umbrella organization to help Linux related FLOSS projects. We weren't quite at the model of a fiscal sponsor, but Tux had mirrors of projects and the goal of helping others.
Then Sourceforge came out and I remember as a 20 year old trying to talk with them about where they saw themselves in the community, and they were basically dismissive of the work that we were doing.
Nonetheless, they had (at the time) flashy software that made them attractive and many projects used them. They were genuinely the Github of their day.
The ultimate lesson of Sourceforge is three fold for me:
1. Never trust a commercial entity that you aren't paying to be your single repository
This applies to Sourceforge and Github, ultimately.
2. Never use proprietary software as your core
Sourceforge, like Github, was proprietary and used that to keep people in. Like Github, the interface to the internals were FLOSS (Subversion in SF's case, git in Github's case).
2. We need better verification/validation methods to handle malware
We need verified builds
Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#57In the late 90s, I was part of a project, which later became a non-profit called Tux.org, who was trying to be an umbrella organization to help Linux related FLOSS projects. We weren't quite at the model of a fiscal sponsor, but Tux had mirrors of projects and the goal of helping others. Then Sourceforge came out and I remember as a 20 year old trying to talk with them about where they saw themselves in the community…
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Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Since the FileZilla fiasco I don't trust projects on Sourceforge any longer either as I cannot tell which projects are complicit in distributing malware and which use Sourceforge as an innocent software repository.
Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#59Real networks
Sourceforge
- Companies that torched their reputation by treating users like s#^t. Straight malware. Seriously, they would have been better off going quiet and then building back up later / selling a higher quality brand.
Developers are valuable to the big players - why drive them away with malware - seems like the malware was targeting wrong market.
And yes, I was part of friends and family IPO at SF.
Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#60One of the guys who started SF taught me about Linux :)