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Comment by davidkellis | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like this is trying to coin a new term. I hadn't heard the word forge used to mean an all-in-one git+issue tracker+project mgmt+etc. suite before.

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The term is decades old at this point. It doesn't seem to play well outside of the older open source communities, now that github has xeroxed.

It is not new. I have heard that word for more than a decade already.

I guess you need to know about the foss ecosystem to know it.

It is not new, but also not ubiquous enough to express something everyone understands.

Trying to get "forge" across as some kind of defacto term just adds noise to the product description, I think.

I also knew it but look at the number of comments saying "what is a forge?" here - it's clearly not a good description.

Yeah, it is funny to read all the assertions that everyone knows what a "forge" refers to in the middle of all the threads wondering wtf a "forge" is...

Once upon a time, a lot of software was released/available through "source forge", which is pretty self-explanatory in the context of software publishing. Then a decade ago, SourceForge shit the bed and destroyed its reputation. I'd bet that most of the developers saying they've never heard of "forge" in this context have entered in the industry in that time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forge_(software)

That Wikipedia page was created in April 2008.

> Examples of such services are: Sourceforge.net, GNU Savanah, Google code

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Forge_(software)&...

Ever heard of Sourceforge?

This is a bad association even for people that recognize it. Presumably there were good years but most will probably remember the ugly endgame with awkward UX and weird ads masquerading as fake download links.

This is such an interesting thing of generational difference, since I remember sourceforge fondly before the crazy era of so many ads.

I don't remember any era of sourceforge where it had good UI.

I also don't remember anyone ever calling it a "software forge".

Now that I think of it, Sourceforge is perhaps the first good example of enshittification in this domain that I can think of.

The thing about enshittification is, first you need to eyeballs and brand, before you can sully it. Sourceforge was great for a while.

> Ever heard of Sourceforge?

Yup! That clears it up. It’s the site that serves lots of ads and binary packages of some old software. At least as of the last time I looked some years ago.

Ok then, not sure I would want more things like that today to self host, but to each their own.

The first time I heard that word was in Sourceforge, decades ago.

It’s not new, it’s outdated and they’re trying to make it come back.

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