There is still some code hosted on SourceForge that has no other public source. This is unsettling because I don't know how long SourceForge will continue operating and Wayback Machine captures of SF pages don't include tarballs. Download backups yourself whenever you find something like this.
I'm contributing to someone's software that started as an academic project. The current version is on GitHub with history back to 2014 but early releases back to 2008 (from before the author started using version control) are on SF in the form release_1.0.tgz, release_1.1.tgz, etc. I stumbled on these old versions this weekend while looking for related material. Once I decompressed them I found that they contained notes and old code that really helps to understand the current project's evolution and structure.
Yeah, what especially irks me with SourceForge is the common habit of projects regularly deleting all outdated releases (due to some per-project size limit? or just not to clutter up the list?). In old projects with messy releases, it can be very hard to piece together exactly which revisions went into a version "x.y.z" that everyone else depended on, except by actually looking into the released files. If those files don't get archived anywhere, they just get lost to the ether. (At least, short of a manhunt for anyone with the files in an ancient backup at the bottom of the sea.)
It was early example of the "enshittification" phenomenon. It was a particular bad example of advertising and other spammy distractions because sites for developers have the lowest CPM of anything except maybe anime fan sites.
It is super hard to break through a two-sided market but it is possible when a competitor has given up entirely on competition, which might have happened in the SourceForge case because the money situation was so dire they couldn't afford to invest in it.
...lowest CPM of anything except maybe anime fan sites.
I am not in ads, so could you expand on this? Why are anime sites low value vs other niche? I would naively expect that anime has huge numbers of <20 year old fans who are more prone to advertising merchandise.
A small SourceForge retrospective for those not around at the time:
This post's overview of contributing to Open Source is largely correct. You'd get the source tarball for a project, make some changes, and then e-mail the author/maintainer witch a patch. Despite the post's claim Open Source existed long before 1998.
Rarely did Internet randos have any access to a project's VCS. A lot of "projects" (really just a program written by a single person) didn't even have meaningful VCS, running CVS or RVS were skills unto themselves. There was also the issue that a lot of Open Source was written by students and hosted on school servers or an old Linux box in a dorm.
SourceForge came along riding the first Internet bubble. They let a lot of small FOSS projects go legit by giving them a project homepage without a .edu domain or tilde in it. They also got a managed VCS (CVS at first then Subversion later) and contact e-Mail addresses, forums, and other bits that made the lives of Linux distro and BSD ports maintainers much easier. They also had a number of mirror sites which enabled a level of high availability most projects could never have had previously.
Then SourceForge's enshitification began as bubble money ran out. The free tier of features was decreased and then they started bundling AdWare into Windows installers. SourceForge would literally repackage a Windows installer to install the FOSS application and some bullshit AdWare, IIRC a browser toolbar was a major one.
As the officially upstream source for FOSS projects bundled for package managers the AdWare wasn't much of a problem. But SourceForge was the distribution channel for a significant amount of Windows FOSS apps like VLC, MirandaIM, and a bunch of P2P apps which were impacted by the AdWare bundling at various points.
A GitHub founder patting themselves on the back for the success of GitHub is sort of funny because GitHub followed a similar track to SourceForge but got bought by Microsoft instead of a company coasting on VC money. I can easily imagine a world where an independent GitHub enshittified had they not been bought by a money fountain.
Was there ever a point in time where it wasn't something that basically sucked? For some reason there are still some widely used ham radio packages that are hosted on sourceforge and it annoys me greatly. When you click the big green "Download" for the project you get.... .... a dll file. Why? Because the actual release artifact is some other zip file and for some reason it doesn't deserve the "Big Green Download" button.
SF has always been this bad. Their core data model just doesn't jive with how people actually interact with open source projects.
... and for that matter didn't they stir up some controversy a long while ago for tampering with project artifacts and adding extra "stuff" in them? (spyware / nagware / **ware?)
Yes, they were cool once upon a time. It the place to be, you didn't have to host your own CVS without charge (no git back then, hell, even SVN was released few years after SF). It was like geocities.
It looks almopst impossible today, but launching a service was really hard and expensive back then. It cost a lot of money/effort in just software. All that stuff you can just download and it actually works? No way man, didn't exist yet.
That is why LAMP stack was so great back then, it was free, working and reasonably low-maintenence and super easy to set-up.
Yes, they used to be great for open source projects. They did get wrapped up in controversy where another company took over and were including other software in the installers, if you weren't careful to uncheck the optional (and unrelated) software. There is still great software hosted there, like FileZilla if you use a Windows environment. FileZilla did have the optional software installs for about a year or so, but as long as you paid attention, it was easy to get around (you just had to pay attention, but that's not an excuse for what they did).
> Was there ever a point in time where it wasn't something that basically sucked?
Yeah, when it launched it was cool and hip. Free public CVS server to host your open source cool project was cool. Probably went downhill as the ad market fell apart post dot-com, and the only way to get revenue was big green download buttons.
philipkglass|1 year ago
I'm contributing to someone's software that started as an academic project. The current version is on GitHub with history back to 2014 but early releases back to 2008 (from before the author started using version control) are on SF in the form release_1.0.tgz, release_1.1.tgz, etc. I stumbled on these old versions this weekend while looking for related material. Once I decompressed them I found that they contained notes and old code that really helps to understand the current project's evolution and structure.
LegionMammal978|1 year ago
PaulHoule|1 year ago
It is super hard to break through a two-sided market but it is possible when a competitor has given up entirely on competition, which might have happened in the SourceForge case because the money situation was so dire they couldn't afford to invest in it.
3eb7988a1663|1 year ago
giantrobot|1 year ago
This post's overview of contributing to Open Source is largely correct. You'd get the source tarball for a project, make some changes, and then e-mail the author/maintainer witch a patch. Despite the post's claim Open Source existed long before 1998.
Rarely did Internet randos have any access to a project's VCS. A lot of "projects" (really just a program written by a single person) didn't even have meaningful VCS, running CVS or RVS were skills unto themselves. There was also the issue that a lot of Open Source was written by students and hosted on school servers or an old Linux box in a dorm.
SourceForge came along riding the first Internet bubble. They let a lot of small FOSS projects go legit by giving them a project homepage without a .edu domain or tilde in it. They also got a managed VCS (CVS at first then Subversion later) and contact e-Mail addresses, forums, and other bits that made the lives of Linux distro and BSD ports maintainers much easier. They also had a number of mirror sites which enabled a level of high availability most projects could never have had previously.
Then SourceForge's enshitification began as bubble money ran out. The free tier of features was decreased and then they started bundling AdWare into Windows installers. SourceForge would literally repackage a Windows installer to install the FOSS application and some bullshit AdWare, IIRC a browser toolbar was a major one.
As the officially upstream source for FOSS projects bundled for package managers the AdWare wasn't much of a problem. But SourceForge was the distribution channel for a significant amount of Windows FOSS apps like VLC, MirandaIM, and a bunch of P2P apps which were impacted by the AdWare bundling at various points.
A GitHub founder patting themselves on the back for the success of GitHub is sort of funny because GitHub followed a similar track to SourceForge but got bought by Microsoft instead of a company coasting on VC money. I can easily imagine a world where an independent GitHub enshittified had they not been bought by a money fountain.
eric-hu|1 year ago
cruffle_duffle|1 year ago
Was there ever a point in time where it wasn't something that basically sucked? For some reason there are still some widely used ham radio packages that are hosted on sourceforge and it annoys me greatly. When you click the big green "Download" for the project you get.... .... a dll file. Why? Because the actual release artifact is some other zip file and for some reason it doesn't deserve the "Big Green Download" button.
SF has always been this bad. Their core data model just doesn't jive with how people actually interact with open source projects.
... and for that matter didn't they stir up some controversy a long while ago for tampering with project artifacts and adding extra "stuff" in them? (spyware / nagware / **ware?)
mnau|1 year ago
It looks almopst impossible today, but launching a service was really hard and expensive back then. It cost a lot of money/effort in just software. All that stuff you can just download and it actually works? No way man, didn't exist yet.
That is why LAMP stack was so great back then, it was free, working and reasonably low-maintenence and super easy to set-up.
progmetaldev|1 year ago
toast0|1 year ago
Yeah, when it launched it was cool and hip. Free public CVS server to host your open source cool project was cool. Probably went downhill as the ad market fell apart post dot-com, and the only way to get revenue was big green download buttons.
account42|1 year ago