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Hosted on sourceforge ugh. Seems quite a few of these open source revivals have been written in Java (possible mild confirmation-bias here.)

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There's a bunch of old, mature, projects that were started at a time when Sourceforge hosting made sense.

I agree that sourceforge is a scumbag company now, but what's the alternative for people who want a place to host binaries, source code, and user forums?

Github has binary/release hosting support now, but doesn't do user forums or mailing lists.

FreeCol is a relatively old project (I think I recall giving it a spin way back in 2006 or 2007), dating back to when SourceForge was not-evil and that's where everybody was.

At the time, I'm not sure there really were better options than Java for a cross-platform open-source game like this. Maybe Python with PyGame.

Qt became available under GPL in 2000, so that would have been a potential match. Anyway, technology choices are of course very dependent on the project founders' skills and preferences.

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