Before GitHub

I absolutely loved Trac. Getting a Trac setup as step 1 in starting a new open source project was just an unbelievable amount of friction.

Fun fact: Django is still running on Trac today, and has been for more than 20 years now: https://code.djangoproject.com/timeline

(I was not involved in setting that one up, though it's possible I helped get the private Trac that pre-dated it running, I honestly can't remember!)

> Before GitHub, Open Source was a much smaller world.

Not that much smaller right-before GitHub and right-after it became available.

> but in the number of projects most of us could realistically depend on.

Most FOSS I realistically depend on I don't obtain from GitHub actually.

> There were well-known projects, maintained over long periods of time by a comparatively small number of people.

There were even more not-well-known projects, maintained for less time, by a larger number of people. They just weren't that many of them in one place.

> You knew the names.

You absolutely did not know the names. Post author is just thinking of the names they knew as though those were everybody.

> reputation mattered in a very direct way.

And now it doesn't?

> We took pride (and got frustrated) when the Debian folks came and told us our licensing stuff was murky or the copyright headers were not up to snuff, because they packaged things up.

RedHat was just as popular a distribution; and most users used Windows (like they do today); and the BSD distributions were a thing (although we didn't have Apple's BSD, i.e. MacOS)

Bottom line: Inaccurate description of history.

> You absolutely did not know the names. Post author is just thinking of the names they knew as though those were everybody.

I absolutely knew the names of the people I interacted with and whose projects I used. I even went to conferences with some of them. When I worked on my first web portal for Ubuntu we had a total of about ~4 dependencies and all was vendored. I knew the person who packaged my Python libraries for Debian.

You might call it an inaccurate description of history but it is very much my experience.

I liked bitbucket, it did its job, it didn’t break for me and I preferred mercurial.

Employers used GH so I switched but even now I use GH as a dumb git endpoint and do all my build/deploy with docker and shell scripts so switching for me is extremely cheap.

For work stuff I’ll use whatever I’m paid to use if I don’t get to make the call just as it was back in the svn days.

If it wasn’t for SourceForge I’m not sure my life would’ve ended up where it is! They use to promote projects they liked and ended up putting Waterfox on their front page a few times. Really sad when they started blasting people with ads and swapping out installers with adware for popular projects. By that time I moved to Microsoft’s CodePlex, if anyone else remembers that? Felt like I was the only one using it at the time! I remember the connection speeds to it were atrocious, but appreciated they’d share ad revenue from the downloads of a projects page which was nice. I remember it was actually super expensive to offer downloads [for binaries] back then, using these code hosting websites was the only way to do it for “free”