SourceForge Acquisition and Future Plans
sourceforge.net
sourceforge.net
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 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.
The only thing ever good to say about it was that it was free.
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).
None, that's why it did so well :)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 know people use PHP. It's not popular with the cool kids. Maybe you didn't get the memo.
The industry is a lot more than just "the cool kids", you know.
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)
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!).
Here's hoping for the SF revival.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Brave.
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.
"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."
I have fond memories of SF and keeping some completion in the market is always good.
Nobody goes to SourceForge for SourceForge.
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.
- 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.
What about Google Code? Freshmeat?
Overnight is not a literal thing, but one day the site's there, and the next? Nothing.
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.
Right now uBlock won't even let me visit Sourceforge without adding it to my exceptions list (probably for a good reason).
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 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.
[1] http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/the-winter-of-our-disconten...
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
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? :-)
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It may not be enough to save SF, but at least it's going in a better direction now. Hopefully they will make other significant improvements too.
Then again, this is HN.
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.
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.
SourceForge have stumbled, badly, but if they play their cards right, this could become a very exciting time for open source.
You poisoned the well. On purpose. You'll never shake that.
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.
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.
There's a decade of utter indifference there combined with malicious sabotage of popular projects several times over.
Going from the frying pan to the fire is hardly the best plan, especially with offerings like Gitlab, Gitorious and Bitbucket readily available.
• 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.
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?
Why would you use sourceforge over say something like Gitlab?
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.
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 :-)
For example: https://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Asourceforge.net%20pa...
Actually sounds kinda fun.
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.
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.
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 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.
That's not attitude, it's linguistic convention.