Rosencrantz: Did you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with a lid on it?
Guildenstern: No.
Rosencrantz: Nor do I, really. It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean, one thinks of it like being alive in a box. One keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead, which should make all the difference, shouldn't it? I mean, you'd never know you were in a box, would you? It would be just like you were asleep in a box. Not that I'd like to sleep in a box, mind you. Not without any air. You'd wake up dead for a start, and then where would you be? In a box. That's the bit I don't like, frankly. That's why I don't think of it. Because you'd be helpless, wouldn't you? Stuffed in a box like that. I mean, you'd be in there forever, even taking into account the fact that you're dead. It isn't a pleasant thought. Especially if you're dead, really. Ask yourself, if I asked you straight off, "I'm going to stuff you in this box. Now, would you rather be alive or dead?" naturally, you'd prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance, at least. You could lie there thinking, "Well, at least I'm not dead. In a minute somebody is going to bang on the lid, and tell me to come out."
[bangs on lid]
Rosencrantz: "Hey you! What's your name? Come out of there!"
Guildenstern: [long pause] I think I'm going to kill you.
I wonder how many of the HN readers don't remember how amazing sourceforge used to be. It was github before there was github. Easy, solid, project hosting for open source projects when that was often the main barrier to a good project getting more widely known.
I think it's one of the earlier examples of why "grow userbase now, figure out how to monetize it later" can be a bad idea. There was a time when (perhaps) a majority of open source projects were hosted on sourceforge, and I think they assumed that that would just translate to profit (or sustainability) eventually. When that didn't happen, and then they had to compete with Google Code, it began the slide down the slippery slope to the spam-infested site that it is today.
I hope that's changing. We need more options for hosting software projects, we can't rely on github being benevolent forever.
To me what Github got right is making virtually no distinction between end users and developers.
SF tried to shelter "end users" from "dev stuff" yielding bad experiences for both. It's hard to use open source projects without getting at least a little bit technical. And it's hard to contribute when the dev side of things is kind of hidden somewhere. And yes, 2-3 clicks in the UI do make all the difference.
(I'm not replying specifically to this comment, just the whole discussion on what made GitHub better)
There is one thing about github I find annoying, which is inseparable from what makes it great. On SF, it was normal and the cultural norm to find compiled software along with the the source. I just spent my morning going back and forth with a dev on github because his project will not compile on my machine. I had found a cludgey hack to get working, but it broke any chance of future commits, and I figured he would rather have things working right. We both just gave up in the end, it wasn't worth the time for the estimated amount of effort I was going to put into the project.
Given the widely different environments people work in, it would be nice to see a bit more compiled code, and the concomitant dev effort before release to make sure it is actually possible for other people to use. On SF I downloaded so many little utilities similar to GNU tools that just worked and got me running in under a minute on Windows, and that is much harder to find today (except on SF--and I hope they come back to rock on!).
Yep. I've been looking into places I can host compiled binaries on a budget of $0. GitHub Releases makes it difficult for security reasons and S3 doesn't fit in my budget.
github doesn't really serve "end users" for the most part. github is designed for libraries and pieces of open source that will be used by other developers. So the "end users" github services are developers.
SourceForge is designed so that developers can serve their wares to end users. As in, someone with a Windows PC that wants to download a media player.
This difference in use case is one reason that SourceForge's top projects are all apps and github's top projects are all libraries/framerworks for use in development projects.
I have to disagree. One of my pet complaints about github is that my mother couldn't download anything useful from there.
SF had great downloads of binaries and I feel that's why it is still used by portableapps and others. If you can't be assed to click 2-3 times, you won't be the most valuable contributor anyway.
Pre-sourceforge, you had to hustle and find a host or pay for it, build a web site, setup a mailing list on it, build all the infrastructure from scratch. Back it up, maintain it, etc.. Bigger projects had an easier job of those things, they'd even have volunteers to do the work. It says nothing of smaller projects or how you started a new project.
Sf dramatically reduced the friction to get things going. Then they also supported different tooling, cvs, svn, others, they had build and test servers, if you want to see if your stuff builds right on alpha running Debian or something else you didn't have access to, they provided that. They invented free code hosting, made tons of mistakes trying to monetize it but at least the first few years their heart was in a good place.
Plurality is good with this stuff, I don't know if it will be good or bad, but github will be different in five years.
The UI wasn't great but how many reliable alternatives were there at the time?
I've never used SF to host something but if so many big open source project used them in the past they had to be doing more things right than just being free (that last one turned to be tricky in the end).
> The UI wasn't great but how many reliable alternatives were there at the time?
None. But when Github came around, there were also no reliable alternatives at the time (other than google code which sucked as well) and it was still a thousand times better than everything else.
Sourceforge was never "amazing". It was never "great". It used to be decent and the only player in the game. When Github came around, it quickly lost both those attributes.
I don't know why people fondly remember the "old sourceforge days" - I remember those days and they sucked.
Don't let the lack of competition forgive how bad something is.
I wasn't a coder in the Sourceforge glory days. But it was a great place for a frequent user of opensource software. I remember a lot of small projects only existence was their Sourceforge presence.
So Github might have provided a lot of new things but Sourceforge was really amazing at what it provided, when it provided.
Being the only player also means nobody gave small opensource projects any home when they did.
It wasn't really the only player; BerliOS and GNU Savannah appeared right around that time, and Launchpad isn't much younger. That said, they weren't really any better, in my opinion. At least SF had a bunch of mirrors, which was helpful back then.
SourceForge started out as a 20% time type project at VA Linux/Research. It was originally open source but went closed source when they pivoted from hardware to SourceForge. Savannah was a fork from before it was closed up.
You probably don't remember that CVS was a wonderful improvement over RCS just like Subversion was a big step forward from CVS. Git is awesome but someday it will be outdated too.
Git is powerful, but it's certainly not the end of version control. Most importantly, it does centralized version control (which is what most of us are using in practice) very poorly.
features like binary file locks, large binaries, large repo
/history and small working copy are either unsupported or only being added with extensions.
Setting up a multi-gig git repo for hundreds of users with binary assets that require full history but also require locking etc. is painful as hell.
The choice of version control system isn't especially relevant. A website like SF/GitHub is about building a surrounding infrastructure around the core VCS, not the VCS itself.
But SF never did that. It just took CVS, and added a thin web portal on top. Once you had the address of the CVS server, there was never any incentive to _stay_ on the SourceForge website for any longer than you had to. You'd just download the code and move on.
GitHub isn't like that. Code is treated as a first-class citizen, and the flow of the whole website is about letting people _explore_ code, and follow its changes over time.
Git may well become outdated, but that has nothing to do with the principles at work here. You could make "CvsHub" along the same "code-first" principles and it'd work great. A code hosting site needs to be about breaking down barriers between the code and its users, and that has nothing to do with CVS-vs-Git.
>The choice of version control system isn't especially relevant.
Actually it is, Distributed revision control has alot do to with GitHub's success as does the rest of their site. With out
CVS,Subversion, the other Centralized systems are just not as good by the nature for open source, peer-2-peer development models that SF was catering to.
To believe GitHub could have been just as successful it is was called SVNHub is to deny reality. GitHub owes most of its success to the underlying technology of Git.
Sourceforge UI could be improved a lot but that doesn't mean the SCM has nothing to do with GitHub's success. They have thought it up alright but the GitHub model of network and connection is the extension of the natural flow of GitHub. And I'm sure implementing such a model of connection, forking and merging would be a whole lot more complicated to implement on top of CVS.
Sourceforge was a time when WebUI, webapps weren't that mainstream. Comparing that with GitHub when everyone wants thing to be much more web centric, when you a popular DVCS is ignoring what the past was like. Also it always felt like Sourceforge UI was primarily for the users of software and not the coder, which is very important for the more regular projects (not dev tools or libraries).
Sourceforge added svn and git later and also CVS was advanced when it was released. Funny or ironical GitHub also provides centralized version control like svn/cvs via pull requests, which I am not a very big fan of due to unlimited, useless fork lying around without real purpose. So actually github undo what git was set out to achieve, provide a distributed version control.
As stated earlier with the closure of Google code the viable alternative for github are not many, so more the competition better it is. Sourceforge project of the month and list of end-user project pages is nicer then Github. Also I use ohloh.net to compare multiple-project and their activity even if they are on github. If sourceforge can make similar analysis, will use them more.
It is called openhub.net and yes they are bit behind in pulling repository data. But it still gives nice project comparison and also activity charts. If some projects can't be found there, personally use python with pandas and matplotlib to generate the same, but takes a bit of time.
They weren’t spectacular. But Sourceforge was, at one time, respected and relied upon by the indie Open Source developer community. Much time has since passed, they ended up sullying their own name, but this retraction, even though it might be a tad late, is welcome. (I was glad to see it).
I agree SF was awesome in it's day. The Windows guys never really got on board which may be why some of the commentators here don't agree. It was an Open-Source thing before Open-Source was accepted by corporate America.
You can say the UI wasn't great but for it's time it was great. You have to remember this was way before any of the the Web tools people use today, except for PHP, but few use PHP now. These were the days when you had to support IE6 and every browser behaved somewhat differently.
I don't remember it being awesome, ever, just less crappy than the alternatives. It was like a bit of flotsam in an ocean, better than fending for yourself, marginally. You could roll your own hosting, but it was obnoxious and expensive. SourceForge was, at best, the Geocities of open-source hosting.
It really hasn't improved much since then.
Also a lot of people still use PHP. I really don't know where you get your numbers. It's just that there's no longer just PHP or Perl, there's dozens of languages that are in play, but the number of PHP devs is surely way higher than when SourceForge launched.
I think it's important to separate its positive effects on the community from the merits of its UI. To me, SourceForge epitomized the "it's complicated for us, so it should be complicated for you" school of UI design. The owners didn't appear to do much to improve that over time, instead treating the site much like toxic code that no one dares to modify for fear of breaking something. No doubt that was a huge factor in their decline, which fed into the user-hostile cash grab tactics. However, the fact that it existed at all when no alternatives were available was great. I wish the new owners the best of luck in turning the site around.
You know, I'm a little disappointed with the HN commentariat. They at least ostensibly seem to be making a good faith effort to improve the site and people are responding with out and out venom. Yeah, I'm skeptical too but that's no reason to be so vicious.
And, the venom is directed at a target (the new ownership) that had no role in the malware bundling, and in fact is diametrically opposed to it and doing everything it can to dismantle it.
A company forthrightly saying that something the company previously did (under different ownership) was unethical, and they are hereby ceasing it immediately, is rare, and refreshing. It should be celebrated.
How does SF make money and how does it plan to make money? It seems like it went into a downward spiral of lower traffic and increasingly abusive advertising. Only the latter seems like something you can fix quickly.
SourceForge makes money off of advertising and lead generation. It might sound crazy, but SourceForge's traffic now is higher than it was 5 years ago. It peaked around 2-3 years ago, however. We are a small, agile company with a good team. We can keep the lights on with the current traffic levels without deceptive advertising nor bundled installers. That might not have been true with a large public company running them previously with quarterly earnings having to constantly grow.
Thanks for keeping the lights on. Please do make preparations with archive.org or Archive Team to preserve the projects on SourceForge just in case your current strategy does not work out.
The ad-blocker vs advertiser fight has just turned to total war, your target audience uses ad blockers more than any other demographic and you bet your profits on advertising.
This is the most important question when it comes to trust. Incentives usually win in the end. Figuring out what that endgame looks like is paramount for anybody evaluating SourceForge as a platform.
This. This first announcement is a great start to restoring a bit of reputation to SourceForge however I hope some of the next posts will announce the long-term vision of the new owners for the platform. Monetization is what brought SF down, without a definite plan it's hard to know what's going to stop SF from going back down later on.
Our model can be profitable with advertising and lead gen, with NO deceptive advertising or bundled installers. On top of that we plan to improve the UI and feature set (https just rolled out), and then, we hope, things will only improve from there.
Yes, it's mean. The top comment is at least exuberant. The rest are vicious in a way that says more about the commenters. But please don't refer to them as "HN". It usually takes a while for things to correct, and the cavalry has since come in, i.e. fairer people with votes, flags, and comments to set things right.
A lot of people have reasons for being viciously skeptical. Dice did a lot of damage to that neighborhood. SF, Freshmeat, /.; there's been a lot of complaints over the last few years that seemingly fell on deaf ears.
Trust is a very hard thing to rebuild, especially straight out of the gate. I'm hopeful, with a healthy dose of skepticism. These are some of the first communities I heavily engaged with, in what feels like a lifetime ago.
Part of it comes from not knowing who the new owners are, outside of a nebulous LLC that owns a lot of internet property. What is their actual intent with these properties? Why would they buy SF and not have an immediate roadmap to share? /. is one thing, it's a news aggregation and comment based community. SF, though, that's something completely different. SF isn't a property you just buy and then start crowdsourcing ideas on how to improve/redesign/resurrect. From a skeptical point of view, it could appear as though it was bought because of it's traffic, and now someone has to figure out what to do with it. That's not a promising perspective.
They've taken positive steps already, and promise more. That's why I'm hopeful, but it's really easy to start thinking apart an acquisition like this because of the current lack of transparency from the new owner. Ask yourself how you would approach the purchase of a property like SF. I would guess you'd know why you wanted to purchase it, and what you were going to do with it; and I'd wager it'd be more than just removing the bundleware, adding https, and promising to fix the bad ad model. These are great things, and sorely needed, but it doesn't instill a sense of real vision.
We're at HN, a place where many of us have made our living hacking things, learning, and outsmarting others, or having vision that nobody else did. Sometimes those awesomely positive things can bring out the inner skeptic.
...and what I mean by vision/roadmap is something like before deciding to buy SF I reached out to Gitlab to foster a mutually beneficial partnership, I have a plan for building up the community ala stackex, I've reached out to several large projects that left SF to inquire about their concerns/issues/complaints and see if I can salvage those relationships, etc. These are things that would be priorities, and actually just part of due diligence, especially before purchase. Instead, we have what we have, and time will tell.
We have a roadmap. We are reaching out to large projects. We are going to focus on improving the UI and feature sets for developers. We are going to focus on eliminating bundled installers and deceptive advertisements. You are right that those things are almost part of due diligence and we have been working towards these steps. We will share every part of our long-term plans as they become more clear, and we hear back from parties we are collaborating with.
I don't know if you guys will be able to turn it around, but I appreciate the fact that you're going to stop people getting infected with crapware by discontinuing past owners' practices.
I wish you the best of luck though because it would be doubly sad if you guys sold it to someone who put all the crapware right back.
If you can implement the features which Github has been failing to provide for so long (as per the various polemics which appear on here from time to time), then you could be well in business. Just need to distance yourselves well enough from the previous owners. Good luck!
Logan, Sourceforge is still an incredible valuable source of software and information both. Making it a trusted site again would be great. Best of luck.
I wish you the best. If I can add my 2 cents: please, can you do something about the UI? It's dated badly and hard to use. Also: I realise you need to generate income from ads, but can you please please remove any ads that use dark patterns like buttons that look like you are going to download the software you came for?
The UI will be improved definitely. We just need some time (i.e. more than a couple weeks). It's an old, large beast so it will take a bit of time. And yes the deceptive advertising will be addressed.
Best of luck to you. It would be nice to see some alternative to Github. As nice as Github is, it's pretty currently pretty much a mono-culture, and that's never a good thing.
He's not a dev, strictly speaking, he's the new president of SourceForge Media. That actually raises my hopes, as the brass roughing it out in the comments and interacting is a rare thing these days.
At least they are making steps in the right direction...
"Our first order of business was to terminate the “DevShare” program. As of last week, the DevShare program was completely eliminated. The DevShare program delivered installer bundles as part of the download for participating projects. We want to restore our reputation as a trusted home for open source software, and this was a clear first step towards that."
Thanks for the support. Yes we got rid of DevShare within a week of acquiring SourceForge. I think people will realize quickly we are serious about turning it around.
So is stuff like CNET Download.com which is spewing tons of toxic software over the world. The masses don't care where you're hosting, they just want their download. If those projects on SourceForge moved their traffic would implode overnight.
For quite a few of us, there's no one offering the services SourceForge does. PortableApps.com hosts over 300 separate apps packaged for portability. All of the open source ones are hosted on SourceForge except the ones hosted by the publishers themselves. All are accessible via browser and via direct download with wget/curl/etc so our users can download and update automatically using our platform. github et al aren't really designed for that type of setup. If we move off SourceForge, we'll have to self-host and figure out a way to cover the expense of that.
> For quite a few of us, there's no one offering the services SourceForge does.
Garbage. Not even close to true. It may be inconvenient to use other hosting systems but this is 2016 and there's an embarrassment of alternatives to SourceForge. It might require bolting a few different systems together to make it work, but it's doable.
> If we move off SourceForge, we'll have to self-host and figure out a way to cover the expense of that.
GitHub offers a lot of free hosting, including downloads, but it's a little trickier to use than SourceForge. There's also very inexpensive hosting via other providers where bandwidth is very cheap to free, and many offer steep discounts for open-source projects.
I'm dismayed the community put up with SourceForge as long as it did.
Where's the open-source SourceForge alternative? That's what we need. Even if SourceForge does clean up its act, nobody should be held hostage there. Same goes for GitHub or any other "mission critical" service. Too big to fail is a problem.
Please let me know of a free hosting service that will:
- allow us to host hundreds of apps totaling 100s of GBs
- handle millions of downloads totaling multiple TBs per month
- allow downloads via browser and direct connection via wget/curl/windows networking components
- provide public stats of said downloads
- allow us to store dozens of versions of each app that will see fewer downloads dating back 10 years
- allow me to upload the thousands of files we have on SourceForge via FTP/SFTP just separated in sub-directories by app without using a clunky web interface or requiring me to manually create multiple entries via a clunky web ui before uploading
- be open source like SourceForge is
- be around for at least another 5 years (preferably longer) and has been around for at least 5 (preferably 10)
- not require me to manage another server box, ideally
There are a ton of free hosting options. Most of them are rather terrible. The smaller ones can't handle the amount of bandwidth we push on their "free" tier. Many of them are startups that crash and burn within a year or two. The larger, more reliable hosting providers aren't interested. I've asked.
Github isn't designed for this type of download hosting setup (it's really designed for libraries with really basic app downloading as a recent addition). Plus github is closed source, which isn't a dealbreaker but is less than ideal. And getting thousands of files for download across 100s of apps (separate repositories) would be prohibitive time-wise.
If you were made CEO of SourceForge, what would you do to make it relevant again? Assume shuttering the site isn't an option and you have to do your damnedest to make it work. What would it take? Beyond just pure, clean code and projects are there any services which sites like GitHub don't offer that might entice developers back, regardless of cost?
The only things I can come up with are services like a free server farm for built-in continuous integration and deployment. Maybe strike deals with Heroku, AWS, Azure, Google, Digital Ocean, etc. to make one-click setup and deployments from the project a reality. If they can demonstrate trustworthiness (some sort of trusted third-party auditing?) and rapidly execute on delivering massive value, they just might be able to regain some of what they lost.
Well, I'll assume shuttering the site isn't an option. Be careful also because apparently using the word "the" before the word "site" is taboo to some commenters here. We're going to do the obvious stuff first: get rid of bundled software (done), get rid of deceptive advertising, improve features (like rolling out https, done), and then we will look at ideas like you mentioned. I appreciate the feedback.
Yes, you would gain a massive chunk of traffic if you can get your site spam and malware free. There are still some projects like mp3gain, etc that are useful.
Right now uBlock won't even let me visit Sourceforge without adding it to my exceptions list (probably for a good reason).
Yes the malware is gone. Now what's left is somewhat deceptive ads in some cases (ads with download button images in them). These are served programmatically from ad networks but we're building a system where they can be reported and acted on right away. Hopefully we'll get uBlock to come around.
One feature of the old Sourceforge that I found helpful was the "compile farm" - not so much for the "compile" part (cross-compilers are nice), but to test the newly compiled code.
The reason I chose Sourceforge for all of my projects in the distant past was because of their dedication to Open Source and Free software, not any particular technical merits (though, technically, it was reasonably functional for the time, but a decade of no significant improvement is hard to miss).
Github is a great product, but they are not as open as SourceForge once was (the source code to run your own SourceForge was available).
Also, SF still has several tens of thousands of projects, including a few very large ones. Merely stopping the bleeding would be sufficient to remain a large OSS project hosting site.
The zeroth step would be to have a vision for sourceforge.
The first step would have to be slim down the site to make it actually fun to use. It tries to be everything for everyone. It has so many options and features, but most of them with such a bad UI that it takes ages to accomplish anything.
I remember that I once found a bug report on a project I used, and even after logging in to sourceforge, I couldn't find a way to submit a patch or add a comment to that bug report. That's simply a no go. Make it easy to contribute, even if that means throwing out half of the subsystems.
And yes, something CI/CD-like might be a good vision. Adding it to the existing cruft would not create a good experience though.
I wrote about this before once [1], but the key thing SourceForge needs to realize is that the users content is the single most important asset they have, and they need to present that on the page with more importance than any other UI element. It's something GitHub got right from day 1, but SF never managed.
Even if shuttering the site were an option... it would be a bad one. The site has millions of daily visitors and is within the top 300 worldwide. There's ad revenue in that alone if you wanted to go that route.
I wrote that mostly tongue in cheek, given that I suspect more than a few people here on HN would, if made CEO, shut the whole thing down as a public service.
If I was in it for the really long haul I would try to strike an integration deal with gitlab, and position myself as part of the ecosystem with gitlab for the source, and sourceforge for the binaries / large assets, and (try to) make money with commercial developers purchasing more private space for their assets (say free tier is x gb, you can pay for much more)
Not sure it would work, but I think having a counterpart to gitlab for the binaries/assets and for the non-technical users in general would be nice
Props for Logan Abbott, I don't think it's easy dealing with some comments over here. I wish people could see what it is. He's taking a risk trying to turn SF arround. He knows what it was and i'm curious how he is going to improve it over time. Good luck with that.
It's going to be exciting times for open source ( gitlab, github, SF have had soms announcements the last days). I use github and gitlab for separate reasons right know and SF mostly for legacy apps. I think it would be interesting to see gitlab and SF working together, as they are both having some overlapping visions I suppose.
PS. Hi Sytse, what are you using to watch the web for mentions of gitlab? :-)
Too little too late. While there are certainly plenty of rarely-updated packages still on SF, many of the good active ones have already left. They'll need significant investment in order to turn things around quickly enough and bring users back. Somewhat hard to believe the ROI will work out though...
Some stuff I've found that, for some reason, is still on sourceforge:
* Pyqt
* Supertuxkart
* Quakespasm (Really popular Quake 1 engine)
* Hammer of Thyrion (Only major Hexen 2 engine)
And I'm sure there are more.
The later two make some sense - they aren't major projects by any means, and are just hobby engine ports that probably would take a lot of work to bring to gitlab/hub.
Pyqt is downright massive, it is the premire GUI toolkit for Python, and for some reason it is still on sourceforge.
Supertuxkart is one of the pantheon of really good open source games, and recently got a massive update. And its still on Sourceforge...
So there is still a lot to lose if Sourceforge went away. Plenty of projects desperately need to move but have not done so yet for various reasons.
NB: I used to help with STK development around 2011-2013, so have a likely biased view in this particular discussion.
Actually, SuperTuxKart definitely moved some things away from Sourceforge already. You can find the Github account at https://github.com/supertuxkart. (Finished) assets and their "development" files (blender files, lossless audio, ...) are still on Sourceforge. I have not been actively involved with the project in a few years now, but as far as I am aware this is due to the simply enormous size that assets take up in a game. The finalised assets download is 650MB, the originals is 1.5GB (see http://supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/Source_control). Due to the nature of svn this is only the current HEAD, you can imagine how big of a git repository this would end up becoming, where you by default download the entire repository. (EDIT: Github allows repositories of up to 1GB in size, see https://help.github.com/articles/what-is-my-disk-quota/)
Furthermore, up until recently I believe Github severely limited the size of binaries you could upload. You understand this puts them at an impossibility.
Also, Sourceforge provides mailing lists, Github does not.
The wiki could be moved from Sourceforge to Github, but I do not know if that is a project they currently feel like undertaking. The current setup uses mediawiki and is easy enough for non-developers to update as well as having the same style as the landing page. If you switch to Github wiki, then the style breaks completely with the rest of the STK site. If you switch to a project page by means of the github pages, then you make things (I believe) significantly more difficult to update for the less technically oriented volunteers.
This exactly. The fact that uBlock Origin has anything from them in their block list is telling. They became the worst, there is no coming back from the that.
We will get this resolved. DevShare elimination was just the first step. It's only been 2 weeks. Hopefully you'll see in time we are serious about regaining trust, and are wholly different than the previous owners.
There are the individual, commercial, and private blocks and hosts files which have been created and which have to be individually cleared. Possibly IP blocks as well. As with "inheriting" a former spammer's domains or IP space for email, that damage is long-lived.
Securing a new or alternate donain would be a good investment.
While there may be some tech and projects worth continuing, the brand is blighted property.
Removal of DevShare, adding HTTPS, and removal of all the deceptive advertising is a step in the right direction. The next step is to reach out to all the blacklist providers you're listed on and get removed. You guys are shitlisted all over the place, and for good reasons that may no longer apply.
Sorry if my comment came off too harsh, I'm honestly very glad to hear it. You have a long uphill battle ahead and I sincerely hope you succeed. There's been too much consolidation onto github for me to be fully happy with my realistic choices.
I suspect the new management team of SourceForge and Slashdot will do their very best to right past ills and turn the tide.
However, it's not a bet I'd be making. SourceForge is still home for some file distribution and, perhaps issue management, (thinking binaries) for a surprising number of projects... But for a lot of them actual development activities, the life blood of these projects, are mostly focused on github. In a sense, SourceForge is just a legacy to be dealt with. For SourceForge to come back in any meaningful way, they 1) have to do some serious modernizing and 2) github has to seriously screw up: probably rather moreso than the Dear GitHub issues.
As for Slashdot, I came to HN because of the poor quality of moderation and the juvenile quality of the community on Slashdot nowadays. Perhaps it was always like that and I'm just older now... But it seems to not be the site I originally grew to love in the 90's. Last year I'd had enough and I don't see any need to go back now that I read HN.
It was always like that. When it started many of us were much, much younger. I was 18! It was always a troll magnet, hell the GNAA started there.
Unfortunately for Slashdot, most of us have grown up while it doesn't seem to have. I can't really see how you can change that culture, all I can think is you would have to do it very, very carefully and slowly.
That said, slashdot is in a better state than SourceForge.
Yeah, you're right; I was in my mid-20's, but you're spot on. I think in the past the story moderation was better so there wasn't even so much draw to look at the comments. I got to looking at the comments as the interesting links went down. You're right about the difficulty in changing the formula. People
I also agree that Slashdot is in much better shape than SourceForge. While it's distasteful, they do have readers still. If the new buyers got it for the right price it might make sense to salvage Slashdot and tear down SourceForge; but sounds like they're taking the decidedly more risky approach of trying to save both.
Almost all the comments here seem to be comparing SourceForge to GitHub, but (pre-DevShare) I always liked sourceforge as a consumer site, which is clearly not GitHub's area. Sure, there were some dev-orientated projects, but what made it great for me was the huge library of free, opensource and ACCESSIBLE consumer-facing software, like GIMP.
Is it not? You can have GitHub pages for your project if you wish. Static website with no ads or malware added.
Sure it's not like editing couple input boxes, but SF UX never was good. Even as developer I found navigating SF painful (back then when it was the primary hosting location). I can't imagine it was much better for the average user.
I applaud the commitment, but I think SF should remain dead. It must be a lesion for anyone considering similar actions. The trust is non-existent, there are better alternatives and the world has moved on.
I think the best course of action is to put that commitment and people into a new name, better product and help those few projects still hosted on SF to migrate.
SourceForge still receives 35 million visitors per month so it'd have to "die" to "remain dead". We're going to focus on ridding it of everything that hurt its reputation, and we're already on our way. We're also going to focus on supporting the tens of thousands of developers that rely on SourceForge. People can use archive.org if they want a "lesion" for anyone considering similar actions as the old SourceForge.
I wanted to write it before, but skipped. 35 million page views is not usage. My guess is that you have considerably less sessions with more than 1 page view. I doubt there are more than 5k active projects (again, not the ones used by 1 person).
There are a lot of links to SourceForge on the web. As someone in the thread pointed out there are even spammers abusing it. People clicking on the links and making "sessions" doesn't constitute actual usage.
I doubt anyone in this thread uses SourceForge for hosting. I am not. And I wouldn't recommend it. If I asked my peers if they use it I'm certain that not a single person would say "Yes".
So yes, in my eyes it's dead.
----
Oh I just opened the site and there are statistics on main page. 600 bug reports and 12k commits per week across all of the hosted projects is not really a big number. 10th most recently updated project was updated 1 month ago. Yes there are still some fairly large projects hosted (probably only for distribution) on SF and they receive considerable amount of downloads, but they're only there because they have been on SF for ages.
Without fresh blood, those projects are just the last breath of SourceForge.
Sincerely good luck. My point was that not only you have to fix the past, but also deliver better product. The market is quite saturated, people have choices, the end users are more tech savvy with higher standards, developers expect much more as well.
This seems like an excellent opportunity for SourceForge to become a better GitHub. GitHub, as good as it is, has quite a few weaknesses which they are in no hurry to address. SourceForge could change all that by going after GitHub's corporate business in order to monetize their business and improving every aspect of the free side of the business to match or exceed GitHub feature for feature.
SourceForge have stumbled, badly, but if they play their cards right, this could become a very exciting time for open source.
Sourceforge used to be a reputable source for software, mainly open source. I hope they actually do try to regain the community's trust by getting rid of the crap they were bundling.
While it's probably too little too late, it'd be near from a nostalgia perspective to have Sourceforge relevant again. Created in June 2001, my sf account is my oldest internet account I still have access too. They might have an opening against GitHub if the move fast and correctly.
There is an opening, but the window will close fast and multiple competitors will try to fit through it at once.
Their brand recognition is still high. That's about all they've got going. Something spectacular is required to shock this particular dead horse back into life. But I don't give much for their chances. That brand recognition is high for all the wrong reasons. The new president claims a background in digital marketing and content aggregation, not development or developer engagement.
Does Sourceforge bring any unique assets besides its name, which is arguably a negative? There does seem to be a current in the air of anti-GitHub or post-GitHub discussions, but GitLab or Bitbucket seem better positioned than Sourceforge to grab that opportunity.
Their best asset is probably the pile of useful project still hosted there, even if many are more like legacy projects that haven't had any activity in years.
The name is probably neutral at best. It has a lot of good memories from older open-source types who remember them putting up something that worked in the early days. But there's also a lot of bad memories from people who remember them mostly for serving malware and deceptive advertising.
sf.net does also do mailing list and shell account, and I _think_ possibly non-static web sites. None of them are for high-volume things, though, as far as I know.
Well, they seem like they get their target audience more than Dice did. If I were them I'd start trying to emulate and improve upon github. Seems like right now would be the time to strike.
Yeah. If they get involved with (say) the GitLab ecosystem, that could both reduce GitHub growth + attract more talent/projects to SourceForge. Both of which they'd be wanting to do.
I do think that right now github has multiple issues swirling around it, a lot of people and open source projects are looking for alternatives. Sourceforge used to be the place for open source software, the sooner you can offer a compelling alternative to github the more likely you are to win back a lot of dissatisfied github users.
My morning routine back in the days where the classic asp/.NET v1 transition was happening:
• Read a bunch of RSS feeds in NetNewsWire.
• Catch up on recent activity at FreshMeat, and learn to understand the code.
• Catch up on recent activity at SourceForge, and learn to understand the code (often by simply retyping it into Visual Studio by hand, partly for muscle-memory, partly as a way to think through the problem).
• Maybe read more articles on how to use SVN.
I learned a lot about how to code just with this routine. It would be great to know that aspiring coders would be able to do the same in this day and age.
I wish you well, and hope that you become relevant again. SourceForge was a huge part of my learning experience as a budding developer.
They did not block us, but all deceptive download buttons are coming off of SourceForge. Many of those "deceptive" download ads are actually served from Google AdX, but we are going to make it easy to report them when they arise so we can take quick action.
Just as a test I decided today (Feb 13, 2016) to download WinSCP. Fully surrounding the actual download link[1] are no less than 3 ads with the word "Download" prominently displayed. The project page[2] was even worse with 4 "Download" ads. This is still unacceptable.
What exactly was the reason for acquiring SourceForge? Was it that it came along with Slashdot?
I don't have much interest in what happens to it, but there might be space for a well-run, well-designed source control/issue service.
One thing that SF has is also email lists, doesn't it? Does Github have anything comparable? Or are lists even necessary anymore if you have a quality issue fracker?
We saw a great opportunity in SourceForge: tens of thousands of projects and developers, and a very sizable user base. The problem was that they were being largely ignored by the previous owners. Done right, I think SourceForge can become extremely successful again. Same goes for Slashdot.
All the bundled installers are gone. Next order of business is to rid the site of all deceptive advertising. The old owners began it, but it was not transparent or easy for someone to report a deceptive ad. We will make sure soon that it is so we can begin removing all deceptive ads placed on SourceForge by advertisers buying traffic programatically.
I'll still never trust them, ever again. On top of the lack of trust - the site has been so poorly designed for so long now which is completely unacceptable for a site that makes a profit.
Why would you use sourceforge over say something like Gitlab?
Too little, too late I'm sorry. If you want to do something good why not start something good and then talk about how you wanted to create something modern, safe and based off the what you know when wrong with SF?
Because we'd rather support the tens of thousands of projects and developers, and millions of users that rely on SourceForge. Clean it up, improve the feature set, and be transparent. But alright then.
I moved to GitHub a long time ago, even before SourceForge went to the dark side, because GitHub provided features and a clean user interface that were far more convenient to developers.
I don't plan to return to SourceForge again, but I see a good reason here why SourceForge might want to talk a little about their plans before implementing them. SourceForge has been losing developers and users. If the new owners of SourceForge talk about their plans, many who are contemplating moving away from SourceForge right now, might want to hold on to it a little longer due to the assurances provided by the new owners.
You've said this ad nauseum. We get it! Let the guy try to sort it out. He has a mammoth task ahead of him and I don't envy the work he's got to do to sort this out, but at least he's making an attempt. He's already made the right first moves.
I'll be watching with interest. Either this won't work, or it will work really well! I can't see any middle ground. I hope for Logan's sake that he's a spectacular success and he makes a lot of money in an ethical way :-)
I'm looking forward to seeing how they plan to improve the site, especially now that they've committed to a concerted effort to clean up their ads and their practices.
You're right. If you click on some of those you'll see they are now 404'd. Google just has to de-index them. We've been removing tens of thousands of spam pages like this per day. Should have it all cleaned up in the next week or so.
Whooo boy. Good luck. Fixing up SF into something meaningful is going to be like taking over a dilapidated skyscraper and trying to turn it into luxury condo's.
If I were SF I'd hire some decent C devs and boss libgit2 so they can drop in their own backend that'll work with a decent UX experience. They'll need SVN too but surely that'd be more for in-situ repos. Integrate a decent CI/CD product with binaries and they've got somewhere to start...
An open-source machine learning toolkit(waffles) I regularly use in research was hosted on sourceforge for its entire lifespan, and was recently moved over to GitHub. The change in exposure for that toolkit has been extreme. I don't know how many people will be willing to switch back to sourceforge.
@loganabbott, How will you manage SF? It seems like a big job and if you already own hundreds of websites doesn't this spread you pretty thin? How much are you willing to spend on improving SF? Are you ultimately after ad revenue?
Do you literally not sleep at all, very little or are you just being facetious. I'm curious because I go through regular periods where I skip sleeping for a day or two.
As an early developer of SourceForge I'm glad to see these changes. GitHub is great, but it needs a real competitor and I've always felt SF could be that if done right.
Gitlab is that competitor - great free community edition, great feature set, great free offering.
Sourceforge had a great legacy as the pioneer providing open source hosting, but has a badly tarnished legacy. It may or may not be able to rebuild that.
Your account seems newish, so I'm not sure how familiar you are with HN as a community. But we generally value signal to noise ratio pretty highly here, it's semi-bad form to repeat yourself in multiple comments, and it's very bad form to say things like 'thanks for your support'. That's more for reddit than it is HN.
> it's very bad form to say things like 'thanks for your support'
No, that's not correct.
Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.
I'm familiar with HN. It's just that this blog post was written by me, so I want to listen and respond to the feedback the community has to offer. Most of what got SourceForge in a bad situation in the first place were complaints falling on deaf ears of the previous owners. Improving SourceForge is very important to me.
I've used and known of Dice (sice it was a dialup BBS), Slashdot (before there were user accounts), and Sourceforge (when VA Research were kicking ideas around for how to host free software development). Knew the principles of the latter two personally.
All three of these companies were at one time useful, valuable to their respective communities, and had exceptionally high goodwill. All three squandered it.
I'm not saying it's impossible to return from a breach of trust such as that ... but it's awfully unlikely. There are reasons you don't cash in your reputation. It's almost always a one-time deal. And high-toned protestations that firms or pricipals have changed their ways are almost always not borne out. Spamford Wallace and Microsoft come to mind -- twenty and thirty years of dirty tricks later, they're still little trusted. IBM is a possible exception -- it's difficult to overstate just how loathed the company was at the end of the 1980s, and how much it had recovered by 2000 (much thanks to its role with Linux, Apache, and Perl).
It's looking as if rough weather is setting in to Silicon Valley, and among the mettle which will be tested are a slew of tech-heavy firms, many trusted with a great deal of personal information either intercepted from browsers and devices, or entrusted and offered directly by users. Temptation for existing or future business owners to cash in that trust will be high.
Slashdot and Sourceforge should stand as cautionary tales.
This is probably being downvoted as spillover from the other one, but if you had just posted this comment, it would have been fine. The other one was super not fine. I hope you see the difference.
I stand by my statements concerning Slashdot, DICE, and Sourceforge.
I had no idea what BIZX LLC was, and the press release DICE provided (linked from my post) gave no information. The travel / tourism information came from BIZX's own website: https://www.bizx.info/
As for the name, I call 'em as I see 'em. ".biz" as a TLD has negative equity so far as I'm aware, and BIZX is hardly an improvement on that. I'd suggest considering something more substantial sounding, specific, and trust inspiring.
I think the imagery you referenced in your post was a little non-sensical. But okay. Looks like you got quite a few likes and comments on that post so gold star for you.
BIZX have an admittedly inhereted credibility gap to bridge with Slashdot and Sourceforge. That's going to require both openness and getting well out in front of the message.
Why a principally tourism-oriented website management firm now has an interest in these two specific, storied, and as noted, tainted properties has some 'splainin' to do. The name doesn't much help. It's not awful, but it's definitely not great. There's little on the principles (I've found ... Rodger, is it? via LinkedIn and Bloomberg), and addressing why they're interested and what you're bringing to the table, and, since this is a business, are hoping to take from it, are valid questions for the community to be asking.
Go back to see what the discussion was at the time Dice picked up Slashdot and Sourceforge:
Among the comments: "Who the hell is going to buy sourceforge at this point? It's not even worth the intellectual property behind the scenes. Maybe someone like cnet who wants another distribution channel for not-quite-malware."
Again: I've had at least 17 years' association with Slashdot, and quite nearly as long with Sourceforge. I'm rather skeptical at this point that any private concern can manage them appropriately. It's an uphill battle.
If your intentions are good, best luck to you. Don't think it'll be easy, and there are many who may well be hoping to see you stumble. I'm not one of them, but I'm highly dubious of success.
Thanks for the well wishes. We're not primarily a tourism-oriented website management firm. In fact over 90% of our sites are technology related. Maybe you didn't read the press release.
Thanks for your opinion and your response to my response to a troll. Just clarifying that we removed the DevShare program (unprotected sex to use his analogy)
That they call SourceForge "the site" says something. It was once a reputable, unique and really useful business, the only one of its kind doing pioneering work.
Imagine Sergey Brin having lunch with an elder relative who asks, "How's the web site?"
SF never came within an order of magnitude of Google's success obviously, but the language still betrays the attitude here.
I don't get this criticism. In pretty much every web-based shop I've ever worked, "the site" is unambiguously "our site", for the local value of "our". And on every website I can remember ever having seen that language, it was referring to the very site I was at that moment browsing.
Speaking of odd language, it's always struck me as quite old-fashioned when kids these days say things like "video isn't working on my Facebook". To me, it's equivalent to an old person saying "where did my internet go?" when the Internet Explorer icon is no longer visible on their desktop.
I know it's effectively shorthand for "my Facebook account", but just saying "video isn't working on Facebook" conveys the same information since of course it's going to be their account they're using.
Guildenstern: No.
Rosencrantz: Nor do I, really. It's silly to be depressed by it. I mean, one thinks of it like being alive in a box. One keeps forgetting to take into account the fact that one is dead, which should make all the difference, shouldn't it? I mean, you'd never know you were in a box, would you? It would be just like you were asleep in a box. Not that I'd like to sleep in a box, mind you. Not without any air. You'd wake up dead for a start, and then where would you be? In a box. That's the bit I don't like, frankly. That's why I don't think of it. Because you'd be helpless, wouldn't you? Stuffed in a box like that. I mean, you'd be in there forever, even taking into account the fact that you're dead. It isn't a pleasant thought. Especially if you're dead, really. Ask yourself, if I asked you straight off, "I'm going to stuff you in this box. Now, would you rather be alive or dead?" naturally, you'd prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance, at least. You could lie there thinking, "Well, at least I'm not dead. In a minute somebody is going to bang on the lid, and tell me to come out."
[bangs on lid]
Rosencrantz: "Hey you! What's your name? Come out of there!"
Guildenstern: [long pause] I think I'm going to kill you.