> 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.
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.