One of the guys who started SF taught me about Linux :)
Is that a good thing?
A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
61–70 of 76 posts
Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#62Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#63History 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…
Nit: Given that Sourceforge launched in November, 1999, that would have been the very late 1990s.
More likely early 2000s.
Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#64I'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…
I wish I could upvote you more. I have been a Sourceforge user for the last 15 or so years. There is some software like SQL Squirrel which[1] that I use on a daily basis. The Lazarus[2] project that was on HN front page a few days ago and ART - A reporting tool [3] which are great tools. I presume the developers of these tools are too busy to migrate to other platforms. I understand because these are Open Source applications and I presume the developers have day jobs and family competing for time. I wish Sourceforge well and hopefully they will in time shrug off all the negative sentiments.
If any other Sourceforge team is reading comments, I am a happy user and thank you for providing an alternative platform for Open Source projects.
[1]https://sourceforge.net/projects/squirrel-sql/ [2]http://www.lazarus-ide.org/ [3]http://art.sourceforge.net/
Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#65Sourceforge 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.
What’s your FOSS alternative to FlightGear? MinGW? TortoiseSVN? PortableApps? Code::Blocks? 7Zip? QBittorrent? DeSmuME? WinSCP? XAMPP? Boost? The list goes on and on...
These are all applications I’ve used that distribute through SourceForge. This isn’t a snarky comment; It’s a legitimate question. I use most of these programs a lot, and if SourceForge’s brand is so tainted, what is one to do? (Never using these programs is not an answer)
Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#66Earlier 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…
I was just thinking of Freshmeat, that was a big loss to me as I found it much easier to navigate compared to SF, at least back in the days: I rarely used SF in like 10 years and stopped completely after they added malware to archives.
Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Nit: Given that Sourceforge launched in November, 1999, that would have been the very late 1990s. More likely early 2000s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge
You're right. We started our project in the late 90's but it was only later we moved it to Sourceforge.
Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's a fair argument, but couldn't they at least have sent an email about it?
Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#69Hi, president of SourceForge here. Glad this is trending, albeit a few months later. These articles seem to trend on HN every few months, with many people not realizing SourceForge changed ownership in 2016 and that the new team's been working hard on improving.
To be clear, we had nothing to do with the bundled adware decisions of 2015, and when we took over in 2016, the first thing we did was remove the bundled adware, as well as institute malware scans for every project on the site.
We're working hard to restore trust, so if we win some of you back that would be cool. However, we're just focused on doing right by our million daily users.
Re: A Brief History of SourceForge, and a Look Towards the Future
#70I'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?
Personally, I'm a big believer in second chances in any facet of life, but people seem to act the way you're describing to Sourceforge, despite giving a pass to other entities. It's all a matter of personal perspective.