Ship's still in port actually. Over a million users a day. They're on board and we're improving it for them. Bitbucket's cool too, but it's just a different ship.
Websense blacklisted Sourceforge after the 2013 DevShare debacle. It has remained blacklisted since. It is blacklisted in many other web application firewalls and content gateways too. Sourceforge is inaccessible from many corporate networks due to this. It will remain inaccessible for many more years to come.
It's unfortunate how Sourceforge, once a leader in the open source community, lost the trust and reputation it built over 14 years in a matter of a few weeks. It may take another 14 years to regain this lost trust and even that may not be enough.
It's worth pointing out that SourceForge as we knew it back then ceased to exist quite some time ago. SourceForge was sold to DHI Group, Inc. (DICE's parent company) in 2012 and many of the staff were let go as part of the sale. DevShare came into play in 2014 and was originally billed as a way to help open source developers who wanted to sign up earn an income from their open source work. But then it wound up using dark patterns and then it was morphed into something more and started to be added to projects that didn't want it done (in violation of some trademarks and the like). This destroyed the good will that still existed around the brand even though most of the folks who made SourceForge SourceForge were long gone.
SourceForge was then sold again in 2016 to BIZX, LLC who killed the DevShare program and started scanning all downloads for malware and other baddies.
>It may take another 14 years to regain this lost trust and even that may not be enough.
That's absolutely absurd given how often the biggest names in 'tech' make headlines with one egregious act or another, on a seemingly weekly basis, and continue to march on. As if the tech community can sit atop some moral high ground, thumbing its nose at SourceForge. But nah, let's just keep crapping on a company no longer under the same ownership and no longer committing these acts and hasn't for some time.
This diatribe just tells me Websense and you are not informed on the current state of the open source community. We bought SourceForge in 2016 specifically because we hated what happened with DevShare and killed it on day one. You can continue hating us simply because of the previous owners, but you can probably find better stuff to do with your time. Nobody uses WebSense anymore anyway except for high schools trying to stop students from watching porn during art history class.
Does anyone still use SourceForge after they started embedding adware with their download links? I give them credit for being an early innovator and I know they are under new management as of 2016 and supposedly put that behind them[1] but they have permanently lost my trust.
It's actually worse than that. As an open-source developer deciding where to host a project, I not only need to trust the host, I also need to expect users to also trust the host. If I expect 10% of potential users to bounce when they see that it's hosted on Sourceforge, well, hosting is enough of a commodity that I have no reason to give up on that 10%.
They’re under different ownership; the new owners were apologetic about that nonsense and stopped it immediately. I don’t want to punish people for buying and fixing venerable Internet infrastructure, so though I was angry about the compromised downloads, I’ve no problem downloading from SourceForge since then.
Do you know we have nothing to do with the people that made the decisions to do that bad stuff? I, like you, didn't like it, so I bought SourceForge to remove the bad stuff. I still get shit for it. Kinda weird because the people giving me shit didn't put their financial wellness or reputation on the line to fix what they didn't like, but still armchair quarterback about it. It's like someone saw it fit to burn down a museum, and then someone stepped in to save it and everything inside of it, but still takes the blame for the person who wanted to burn it down. Very odd...
I don't maintain code and description basically refers to GitHub for any issues, but there are still some people who use it, so I don't see any good reason for losing free traffic. Number of download has been falling for years though.
PortableApps.com is still hosted on SourceForge. I think we push around 40TB a month through their download servers. We can't afford that bandwidth on our own. Other hosts like Github aren't really designed for projects like ours that have hundreds of different open source apps.
Setting aside the malware issue, and the project graveyard smell, and just looking at it like a new platform, the design just seems all wrong. The big comic ui elements are ugly and unprofessional, and the code is too hidden, not the central point of the project.
This! I didn't use it enough for the malware thing to anger me much, when it hit, I was already mostly using things from github, and sometimes bitbucket...
The design of sourceforge feels spammy and like early 2k's hotscripts or cnet/downloads.com. I want to click on a project and see the readme and a list of their files so I know what framework/language it's built on from a glance, is it node/php/rails?
I've been playing with gitlab a lot lately for my own projects, I love the way I can easily segment things by groups without doling out cash for my side projects and private repos are nice. You get a lot on their free tier.
Though a lot of my github usage is browsing projects for things I can use in my own code, like admin panels, or integrations of vue/react, vuex/mobx, an auth flavor and x web-framework.
Can you actually host code on SourceForge? I've been searching for 10 mins in a couple different projects and they only thing I've found is one link to a private SVN server.
You can do git, mercurial, and svn repositories under SourceForge. You are not required to do any of them, though, so some projects roll their own elsewhere or just post source code in compressed archives.
We have nothing to do with the previous owners. In fact, FileZilla from their own official site still has a bundled installer, but we made them remove it from SourceForge. SourceForge FileZilla is cleaner than the official site. Check VirusTotal to verify.
Gotta feel bad for SourceForge the new owners reversed the malpractices of its previous owners immediately and yet the damage is permanently done. I'll never understand why some think distributing spyware / malware for money is even remotely right in any way, shape, and form. How is any of it legal half the time...
I find it slightly odd that sourceforge is so highly shunned after the malware incidents, while various other large companies [eg. microsoft (dodgy behaviour in skype, etc.), facebook (spying, selling data), lenovo (superfish), etc.] have been caught doing similar dodgy things and yet it feels like the general community has forgiven or at least grudgingly overlooking them.
May or may not be true - that's just the feel I'm getting.
Why would you feel bad for us? We removed the malpractices right away, became profitable, improved the experience for over a million daily users, and are growing at a rate not seen since before the problems. I'd say we have the opposite of a problem. A few random armchair quarterbacks on Hackers News aren't gonna get us down.
As a consumer of source code, I do not use a graphical web browser to search and download from Sourceforge. A relatively simple http/https client will do. (Occasionally I have used cvs or svn if that is the only access.)
Despite any changes in Sourceforge's ownership/management, I have not experienced any problems retrieving source code. I have not tried to use a graphical browser on Sourceforge since the 1990's. No need.
As an end user of source code, I access Github the same way, without graphics. I do not need to use a web browser or any git executable to fetch a .zip or .tar.gz archive. Will this sort of easy access continue under the new management? I guess time will tell.
Sourceforge still hosts a substantial quantity of what I consider educational/useful software. Of course, Github hosts exponentially more.
Out of curiousity, using archived Github data, I am making a list of Github users and will be monitoring changes as the acquisition progresses. Will they lose many users? Where will the users who leave put their code?
I am debating whether to also construct CSV files with repo names and descriptions for a personal Github database to aid in software discovery. I expect it might not be as easy to compile such a database in the future. I could be wrong, but it is impossible to predict what will happen. Time will tell.
> As a consumer of source code, I do not use a graphical web browser to search and download from Sourceforge. A relatively simple http/https client will do.
One caveat: all the file download links end in .../download, so if I throw the URL at wget it will save "download?verylongblahblah=blahblah1234567890". I have to use `wget --content-d` (short for content-disposition) to actually save the name correctly.
It's really annoying, but a behavior that has existed for many years.
GitHub fixed this with everything, from release downloads to raw gist links, by putting the "download" attribute further back in the URL, and having everything after the final slash be the uploaded file's filename.
[+] [-] itomato|7 years ago|reply
SourceForge has little to offer in their API:https://anypoint.mulesoft.com/apiplatform/sourceforge/#/port...
Bitbucket for comparison: https://developer.atlassian.com/bitbucket/api/2/reference/re...
[+] [-] loganabbott|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xyrouter|7 years ago|reply
It's unfortunate how Sourceforge, once a leader in the open source community, lost the trust and reputation it built over 14 years in a matter of a few weeks. It may take another 14 years to regain this lost trust and even that may not be enough.
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|7 years ago|reply
SourceForge was then sold again in 2016 to BIZX, LLC who killed the DevShare program and started scanning all downloads for malware and other baddies.
[+] [-] Nicksil|7 years ago|reply
That's absolutely absurd given how often the biggest names in 'tech' make headlines with one egregious act or another, on a seemingly weekly basis, and continue to march on. As if the tech community can sit atop some moral high ground, thumbing its nose at SourceForge. But nah, let's just keep crapping on a company no longer under the same ownership and no longer committing these acts and hasn't for some time.
[+] [-] loganabbott|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway2016a|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/under...
[+] [-] jimrandomh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miles|7 years ago|reply
ReactOS https://sourceforge.net/projects/reactos/
FreeDOS https://sourceforge.net/projects/freedos/
hdparm https://sourceforge.net/projects/hdparm/
7-Zip https://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/
[+] [-] 1123581321|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nicksil|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loganabbott|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tananaev|7 years ago|reply
https://sourceforge.net/projects/traccar/
I don't maintain code and description basically refers to GitHub for any issues, but there are still some people who use it, so I don't see any good reason for losing free traffic. Number of download has been falling for years though.
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbfg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gremlinsinc|7 years ago|reply
The design of sourceforge feels spammy and like early 2k's hotscripts or cnet/downloads.com. I want to click on a project and see the readme and a list of their files so I know what framework/language it's built on from a glance, is it node/php/rails?
I've been playing with gitlab a lot lately for my own projects, I love the way I can easily segment things by groups without doling out cash for my side projects and private repos are nice. You get a lot on their free tier.
Though a lot of my github usage is browsing projects for things I can use in my own code, like admin panels, or integrations of vue/react, vuex/mobx, an auth flavor and x web-framework.
[+] [-] chowes|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonymo|7 years ago|reply
SourceForge Hiding Fact that They Have Lost the Latest Revision of SVN https://medium.com/@jonykatz/sourceforge-hiding-fact-that-th...
[+] [-] apearson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dingo_bat|7 years ago|reply
However very few projects choose to. Most just host binaries. And have a github link in the project description.
[+] [-] nbar1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loganabbott|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scottydelta|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loganabbott|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swalladge|7 years ago|reply
May or may not be true - that's just the feel I'm getting.
[+] [-] loganabbott|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mandeepj|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] craftyguy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] textmode|7 years ago|reply
Despite any changes in Sourceforge's ownership/management, I have not experienced any problems retrieving source code. I have not tried to use a graphical browser on Sourceforge since the 1990's. No need.
As an end user of source code, I access Github the same way, without graphics. I do not need to use a web browser or any git executable to fetch a .zip or .tar.gz archive. Will this sort of easy access continue under the new management? I guess time will tell.
Sourceforge still hosts a substantial quantity of what I consider educational/useful software. Of course, Github hosts exponentially more.
Out of curiousity, using archived Github data, I am making a list of Github users and will be monitoring changes as the acquisition progresses. Will they lose many users? Where will the users who leave put their code?
I am debating whether to also construct CSV files with repo names and descriptions for a personal Github database to aid in software discovery. I expect it might not be as easy to compile such a database in the future. I could be wrong, but it is impossible to predict what will happen. Time will tell.
[+] [-] exikyut|7 years ago|reply
One caveat: all the file download links end in .../download, so if I throw the URL at wget it will save "download?verylongblahblah=blahblah1234567890". I have to use `wget --content-d` (short for content-disposition) to actually save the name correctly.
It's really annoying, but a behavior that has existed for many years.
GitHub fixed this with everything, from release downloads to raw gist links, by putting the "download" attribute further back in the URL, and having everything after the final slash be the uploaded file's filename.
Now THAT's nice.