Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why SourceForge Lost

usersinhell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 52 posts

Re: Why SourceForge Lost

#11

Post by duskwuff »

hvs wrote: post #4

I like Github a lot, and SourceForge has definitely dropped the ball, but is anyone else tired of linkbait article titles? SourceForge has a ton of projects still. They didn't "lose" anymore than Github "won". Competition is trip not a destination. Nothing is for sure, and there's no reason why SourceForge can't improve their service and take back more of the market. Us in the tech world need to stop thinking that so…

> SourceForge has a ton of projects still.

That may be true, but I suspect that many, if not most, new projects aren't created on SourceForge anymore.

Most statistics are lies, of course, but Github currently has 2M repositories (including forks), as compared to Sourceforge's 300K projects. Seeing as how SF is over ten years old and Github was launched in 2008, that says to me that Github's where the real action is now.

Re: Why SourceForge Lost

#12

Post by astrodust »

StavrosK wrote: post #6

> Firstly, it’s not because GitHub’s front-end is nicer Nope, I'm pretty sure that's the reason.

Sourceforge looks like one of those shady download sites that's either going to load up your computer with spyware, or one that will have the audacity to charge for "download access" for open-source software.

The design has gone from merely bad to worryingly ugly. The info screen shown in the example is the pinnacle of bad design, where it's all spaced out, no consideration for the content given at all, in an offensively generic style that fits in too well with every content spam site I've ever seen.

The sooner they just shut the site down, the better in my opinion. I actively despise it because of how every change they make seems to make it even less useful, more ugly, or more obnoxious to use.

Re: Why SourceForge Lost

#13

Post by phuff »

Having worked at sf.net for a few years as github was gaining ascendancy, I would say that we thought about this a lot. And while a lot of the things that he says are true, they're symptoms of why sf.net lost, not the real reason.

The real reason why sf.net lost was much more fundamental than that. Really it was so fundamental that it was a business problem rather than a technology problem. As a company, management just wasn't that interested in competing, and therefore we didn't have the institutional ability to focus on competing with some of the things github did.

I am proud to say that it looks like sf.net finally has a fork button, though, and it also looks (from the outside) like there's some focus on delivering developer oriented features now on sf.net, so that's a positive thing.

The engineering and ops team that's over there is awesome and has great open source pedigrees, and has always been super interested in working on things that would make open source development better and easier, but really has been hampered from doing that for years by more basic business issues. I think things might finally be turning around for them, though.

Re: Why SourceForge Lost

#14

Post by astrodust »

scott_s wrote: post #8
StavrosK wrote: post #6

> Firstly, it’s not because GitHub’s front-end is nicer Nope, I'm pretty sure that's the reason.

My mind got snagged on that, too, and it wouldn't let go. The rest of his arguments are not wrong, but I think they fit under that umbrella. That is, it's because GitHub's front-end is nicer, and it's front-end is nicer because SourceForge is oriented around projects and GitHub is oriented around code. The change in focus enables a better presentation.

It's not that Github's CSS is better, or their graphics are better, but that their design is better, and design encompasses everything, top to bottom. Most things on Github feel effortless, and even the tricky things are far from frustrating. This is evidence that they care, and that care shows in that the graphics and CSS are very well done.

Good design doesn't start with appearance, it ends with it.

Re: Why SourceForge Lost

#15

Post by dasil003 »

You know as much as I hate these terms, I think nothing captures the undeniable yet intangible difference between SourceForge and GitHub as Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0.

For the younger members here I think it's hard to imagine just how freaking cool SourceForge was when it first came out. The idea of free, featureful project hosting was amazing. Back in the 90s, even if you had free hosting, there wasn't the selection of easy-to-install FOSS web software that we take for granted today. It's sort of like how cool Slashdot was in a world of Usenet and BBSes. Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo. It's easy to forget how impressive Web 1.0 was for its time.

GitHub by contast came out of the Web 2.0 era where we had solid CSS, solid JS/AJAX, solid web frameworks, and a lot of hard-earned knowledge of UX design, and perhaps more importantly the browser technology to support it. I think the article makes a good distinction between code hosting and project hosting, and no doubt that makes GitHub's job easier, but it's not the whole story. GitHub is the result of a holistic vision that goes from the metal up to the UI and design bits. In the early days of the web putting together a team to do something like that was well-nigh impossible. With the ubiquity of the web today, the new generation of web folks can much more easily pick up both the technical and design skills to create the kind of amazing UX experience that sets GitHub apart from SourceForge.

Re: Why SourceForge Lost

#16

Post by duskwuff »

RossDM wrote: post #5
malkia wrote: post #2

Sourceforge was always hard for me to use, the standard template (code, forums, issues, mailing lists, wikis) were hard to set up (my experience) and use. GitHub's UI really made impact on me, and the short name, the agenda from the people (I've seen couple of videos from the founders talking about not github, but GIT itself). I still get very lost using git (p4 user at work, so svn feels closer) but with enough help…

GitHub UI is significantly better. It just works. Visiting SourceForge feels like going to RapidShare, with all sorts of ads vying for your attention. Each project has numerous sections which may or may not have been filled out by the owner. Heaven forbid that they used the mailing list feature.

> Heaven forbid that they used the mailing list feature.

Or the bug tracker. Ulch!

Re: Why SourceForge Lost

#17

Post by elmindreda »

SF.net lost because the site is incredibly slow, it's usability is somewhere between "whatever" and "bend over", they keep moving things around for no apparent benefit and for quite a while the site assumed visitors weren't potential contributors.

I started hosting code there using CVS in 2000 and it has certainly improved since then, but I recently pushed a branch to GitHub and there's just no comparison.

Re: Why SourceForge Lost

#18

Post by phuff »

maaku wrote: post #10

When I created a SF project some years ago, it required approval from some mysterious and unknown administrator. That process took a week, and during that time I didn't have access to the resources I needed (version control, mailing list, issue tracker, etc.) to get my project off the ground. Things may have changed since, but I wouldn't know because I never came back.

Yeah, we got rid of that process at least 3 years ago when I was still there. There's some after the fact attempt to not allow spam projects, but you can get started right away now (thankfully, that was a super slow process).

Re: Why SourceForge Lost

#19

Post by phuff »

maratd wrote: post #7

The key is that GitHub understands open source. People who write open source aren't magical. We still need food and that means a j-o-b. You can have your public open source code and your private proprietary code right next to each other, in the same place. How brilliant is that?

Sourceforge was definitely created in an era when open source was much more project oriented (think, Samba, gnome, python, etc.) and back then it didn't make as much sense to have open source + closed source code side by side. But things have fundamentally shifted with regards to how open source software is created and sf.net definitely hasn't made the shift as smoothly as it should have.
Post reply on HN