The State of SourceForge Since Its Acquisition in January
reddit.comThey seem to be doing everything that was asked of them at the height of the sleazy days:
- They removed all bundled adware
- They scan the hosted packages for adware bundled by the developer and warn accordingly
- They removed deceptive download buttons
This is really very good news, and I'm willing to give them another shot. To quote from later in the Reddit thread:
It brought in quite a lot of revenue, but obviously that strategy is not sustainable and SourceForge was/would have been a sinking ship. The previous owners were a publicly traded large corporation and SourceForge was not a core part of their business. We are a lean web company with talented developers that has the ability to do things more efficiently. The site is monetized via advertising, but we believe it can be profitable and sustainable without throwing users and developers under the bus. At over a million unique visitors per day, we don't think we need to trick people into clicking on ads in order to turn a sustainable profit.
That had me nodding my head in understanding at "publicly traded corporation." I get it. I work for one. They will throw their workers, their customers, and their business into a meat grinder without batting an eyelash if it means being able to add a couple more cents to their shareholders' dividends.
> publicly traded large corporation
These seem to be no end of trouble when it comes to abusing all trust in an attempt at increasing short term profits.
This is a very good development, but it's difficult to see what SF could do better than Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket, they are bogged down by 15 years of technical debt and a ruined reputation.
Maybe they could retool as a Cloudflare/Akamai competitor? Their network of mirrors is probably the one thing still distinguishing them. Or they could go full-FOSS and somehow integrate with distributions, like a cross-distro Launchpad, but that's a very very very niche market. Or they could find a mobile-oriented spin (I honestly don't know anything about mobile dev).
Or, and I say this very seriously, they could find a way of getting bought by Microsoft. A lot of SF projects are legacy win32 apps that people still find essential (FileZilla etc); MS could buy them and build an appstore that actually has the stuff people want, with real developer tools and workflow powering it all. MS backing would remove the malware stigma, at the very least.
What distinguishes SourceForge is that it has a lot of end-user features. Project owners can set up forums, a download area, a support area (distinct from the bug tracker) and more. That's probably the reason why a lot of end-user focused projects ("legacy win32 apps") keep sticking with SourceForge despite everything.
Yeah, GitHub is not a great user experience if you just want to download the installer for some program.
I still don't get why the presented url for downloading tarballs at github just use the version number, but then redirects to a more traditional filename once clicked. It gets alternative download tools like wget royally confused.
> but it's difficult to see what SF could do better than Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket
When I have a dependency problem ( usually some arbitrary version of a lib that needs to be compiled and linked ) it's much easier if the project is on Sourceforge where I can just go and read down an index to find the appropriate release, which is not necessarily the latest one, and hit 'Download' to receive a nice bz2 which will de-tar into a buildable structure.
At that point in time I don't want to fork the project, or engage socially with other developers, or pick through tags to piece-together a checkout that will link against the dependee. I just want something compilable ASAP.
Perhaps Sourceforge could find a niche there, organising the bazaar of projects on the Git* sites into something sane.
github also does versioned releases, no?
https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/releases as an example
Two things as the author said: ease of use; distribution channel with 1+ mil visitors. The GitHub system is just really weird. Makes sense when someone knows Git and/or goes through GitHub's tutorials. Going to SourceForge, I currently see a big, green, download button to immediately get the bundled app for several OS's plus files right next to it. No odd labels tied to last commit or anything. Just the files. If project owner side is as easy, then there's a definite advantage for people that want to set up a hosting and distribution channel without lots of trouble.
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_...
3rd & 4th paragraph address your comment
Yeah I read that, but it sounds a lot like "compassionate CNet-ism". A first step, but hardly the stuff of dreams.
Gotta start somewhere
FileZilla is a legacy win32 app? I understand what you mean but that's a poor example considering it runs on Linux and OSX as well and is still updated quite frequently.
> Or they could find a mobile-oriented spin
Of what?
SourceForge spent many years making decisions that sank its reputation. I don't think that's going to dramatically turn around overnight.
HOWEVER... it bums me out when a bad actor makes legitimate efforts to turn their act around, and get mostly shit and snark for it. Paraphrasing:
* "I would never download something from them no matter who owns the company now, because the previous owners sucked and I'm emotionally invested in disliking the brand."
* "This speed test service that they just made available for no ulterior motive at all doesn't work outside the U.S. yet. Pffffft."
* "Why would anyone use them instead of GitHub?"
* Etc... far more nasty stuff over in Reddit discussion.
Look. Years ago I switched over to GitHub (and later GitLab)... because SF was slow to adopt Git, and the interface was pretty weak once they did. There are more steps and complexity involved in setting up a full SF project than creating a simple GitHub/GitLab repo. So even now, I wouldn't consider SF for hosting a personal project Git repo if I had no intention of distributing binaries.
However, SF has always been geared more toward hosting full project sites directed at end-users, rather than simply hosting a source code repo for developers. That's why they "lost" to GitHub, because it turns out that most developers just need the best source code host and don't care about distributing binaries to end-users.
But if you have a project that you want to share with the world in binary form, rather than just a resume item to be seen by other developers, then SF has never had a serious challenger. GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket... none of those guys really care about competing in THAT space. So for the couple of projects that I've wanted to make end-user facing, I've continued to use SF even though my source code is over on GitLab. Bandwidth is expensive, and hosting a reliable end-user facing website is a pain in the ass, so I'm grateful that SF is there as a free option.
So if you just need Git hosting, maybe you don't care. But it's fantastic that someone has stepped in and tried to right the ship, so there will continue to be a viable option for end-user facing binary hosting. I'm grateful for these guys, and hope they succeed.
Seriously... we've largely started embracing Microsoft of all companies after their recent about-face. There's no reason not to be positive about SF trying to become a good actor, even if their strengths don't happen to fit your own use case.
> it bums me out when a bad actor makes legitimate efforts to turn their act around, and get mostly shit and snark for it.
If there are no punishments then a rational (ie amoral) actor will betray initially and cooperate (for a while) when caught. If there's no cost for a turnaround you incentivize bad behavior.
The financially correct way to handle this is to penalize SourceForge perpetually so that it's of less value. This ties behavior to valuation and actually provides a disincentive going forward.
> we've largely started embracing Microsoft of all companies after their recent about-face.
Doesn't it seem unfair to all the honest companies out there for us to keep going back to MS? If we don't penalize their illegal past we're essentially burdening all the companies who complied with the law.
In that ecosystem when do new players get their first chance?
What feature could we add to GitLab so that downloads are easier?
This is a win for the Web, whether they gain market share or not.
sounds like the new owners understand the mistakes of their predecessors.
For me it is too late. SF used to be the place I looked first. Recently I wanted to download windirstat and could only find it hosted on SF so I opted instead to LiveCD and just use some gnu tool.
Sorry to hear that. We would love to have you back at some point. I know it takes time to rebuild trust but hopefully people will see we are serious about it with the steps we have taken.
I wanted to come up with a nice snarky counterpoint, but figured I should go have a look first. The new landing page looks nice, and it no longer looks like a download.com clone packed with adware. Good job.
Request: Stop making javascript only pages. I browse with noscript enabled and I noted most of the 'new' things use javascript loaders, so I can't see them. This will help regain the trust of privacy loving users.
> This will help regain the trust of privacy loving users.
Also, while Javascript is sometimes useful web pages (as opposed to web applications) IMO shouldn't depend on it.
Quite right. It's just like css. It may enhance a page, but pages should always fail back gracefully to basic content if a user cannot support it.
WinDirStat has hosted binaries on FossHub as well as SF for quite awhile now (http://windirstat.info/download.html). Also, there are dozens of similar alternatives (http://alternativeto.net/software/windirstat/).
You downloaded a Linux distribution, burned it to CD/USB, and went through a full reboot... to figure out which directories on your Windows PC had a lot of files in them?
Wat?
Their new advertised speed test has servers only in US. Completely unusable for the rest of the world (unless you need to measure your interned speed against US servers).
Logan Abbott from SourceForge (and that reddit thread). We are aware of this. We were definitely not expecting this thread to become so big. We are adding international servers ASAP hopefully next week.