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Comment by copx | Hacker News Reader

>I am urging everyone who still has projects on Sourceforge to do the same.

Where is that other great free service which hosts large binary assets, web sites, wikis, forums, and trackers i.e. everything you need for a project.

Github is only a solution for software without meaningful binary assets where the user is expected to build the software himself and no community interaction beyond pull requests and issue reports is desired.

There is no free alternative to SF for many users, that is the problem. And well, "free", that is the key word here, at the end of the day SF has to make money somehow. As a non-paying SF user I cannot really complain about ads.

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> Github is only a solution for software without meaningful binary assets where the user is expected to build the software himself and no community interaction beyond pull requests and issue reports is desired.

GitHub Releases addresses this (i.e you can release compiled binary assets as your "release", rather than just an archive of the repository). Also, GitHub Pages is pretty useful if you want to build a user-facing site for your project.

edit: typo

Ad-supported business models are OK when the website is view-driven. When the site is download-driven, web ads will never make up for the bandwidth costs, so you'll often end up with sites distributing adware to make up for it (target the area of your product that is actually being used).

So this is a broken model that Sourceforge entered itself into. You absolutely can and should complain that a service has a broken business model resulting in a horrible user experience.

It seems like the obvious business model for SourceForge is to allow you get rid of ads with a LinkedIn account, then charge recruiters and tech companies looking for active developers or tech savvy individuals.

I'm not sure if that model would make people happier.

How large assets are we talking about? GitHub allows hosting up to 1GB/file: https://help.github.com/articles/distributing-large-binaries...

Software distribution used to be done via FTP sites, separate from the project web pages, documentation, issue tracker, etc. iBiblio [0] will still host stuff for distribution. There's also Savannah.nongnu.org [1] which is an old fork of the SF code.

[0] http://www.ibiblio.org/share/

[1] http://savannah.nongnu.org/

I have no experience with them, but I've seen some projects using Bintray:

https://bintray.com/

Apparently, they have some integration with GitHub as well.

For binary assets, why not just rent a cheap digital ocean box? You get a 20GB server for $5/mo.

Throw up an nginx install to forward part of the site to github, and downloads direct from disk, and you have a nice - and fully customizable - project setup.

https://launchpad.net ?

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