So the post in /r/sysadmin[1] has nothing to do with reality? I guess we'll have to wait for a post-mortem. I don't want to be in the shoes of the ops personnel there, I hope everythings turns out fine!

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/3do9k0/sourceforg...

>"We consulted with our storage vendor when forming our next steps."

They didn't mention Extremely Massive Corporation in this blog post.

As someone who visited Sourforge to download GIMP 7 years ago, why does this site still exist?

1. What is the alternative for user facing open source projects? The icentives for GitHub are even more misaligned as they want to attract developers and not users. I am wondering how long it takes till they shut down their binary release feature again, once everyone puts their binary releases there.

2. It gave you all the stuff you needed for your project at one place. The SCM of your choice, mailing lists, hosted forums, wiki, bugtracker, and a website with PHP/MySQL. They have retired hosted forums, wiki and bugtracker now.

3. It increases the discoverability of your project. The project summary page actually gives a nice overview of the main points of your project such as licence, category and features; They have things like project of the month, etc.. Without sourceforge (and freecode) we are at SEO, social media and word of mouth for open source PR. This is much more effort.

4. They allow huge binary downloads which can be uploaded with e.g. rsync and scp.

Loosing all this might be fine for a large project such as GIMP, as they have the manpower and donation money to do it themselves. For smaller projects this distracts from developing the project.

While what you say might be true, when I want to download some project and find out that it's hosted on SourceForge, my first thought is "oh crap, it's probably outdated and unmaintained". The second one is "I'll better check again, maybe they migrated somewhere else".

I don't trust SourceForge anymore like I used to in the past. Stuff like taking over old projects and adding adware to them definitely don't help, but even ignoring that SourceForge still feels dead.

>1. What is the alternative for user facing open source projects? The icentives for GitHub are even more misaligned as they want to attract developers and not users. I am wondering how long it takes till they shut down their binary release feature again, once everyone puts their binary releases there.

At this point I have to wonder - why not have a paid download service for OSS builds - like 1-2$ or whatever symbolic price minimum - this will probably cover the download costs and maybe leave your project some tiny bit of cash.

At the same time provide a free build link on torrents so that your users can access it trough torrents if they don't want to pay - it doesn't cost you anything (even the bandwidth if your project is hosted on something like GH pages).

So you pay 1-2$ for convenience or go download trough torrents or if you can't use torrents and you're brave search google for mirrors.

The simple answer is that 98% of users won't pay it.

Source: I manage an open source project used by a few million people.

98% seems like a very generous user-base. Getting 20k$ from the 2% in your million users would maintain the download server for at least twenty years.

I assume it's much lower than 2%, which would fit my experience. From about a thousand users (a conservative estimate), I get around 10m$/user on average, and 0.3% of paying users.

And the SFLC will help you to create the onerous organization you need in order to collect, possess, and spend that money by committee.

And that is why everyone turns to the ASF for help in this situation, since they already exist, but that's probably not sustainable.

The answer is not clear.

But I'm not saying provide free download as an alternative - I'm saying provide binaries only with the 1/2$ fee - if the person doesn't want to pay they still have the torrents and the source.

For example if github provided this service instead of binary releases - you would receive say 50% of the income they keep 50% for bandwidth/service. If the person uses alternative means than you're not spending resources anyway.

I appreciate the clarification.

The take away for me is that Sourceforge was a distribution as well as a management platform for open source projects. The distribution part differentiating it from other project hosting sites.

Sourceforge isn't providing most of the distribution infrastructure, you usually download tarballs from mirror sites, you only connect to sf.net itself if you want to use the SCM system for a given project.

This is a boring meme that needs to die in a fire. SourceForge have taken a few missteps in recent months (and received plenty of flak for it), but it's been a reliable environment for open source development going on nearly 16 years. Note despite the silliness around their download system, repositories, lists and site hosting still function as they always did.

As a result of the community backlash against SF's download wrapper, I've had to click through more "attack site warning" pages in the past month just to reach some valuable SourceForge project (of which there are many thousands) than possibly all the previous year combined, though I notice in the past few weeks, Google have silently dropped SF from their blacklist (no PR fanfare this time however).

People continually use GitHub as some bastion of how things should be done, but someday GH will also exhaust its natural growth and start more aggressive upselling (regardless of their existing business model), quite possibly under a different management after the founders have all left for greener pastures. It's not a question of if that will happen, but when. Maybe in 16 years time? Who knows. It seemed deeply unlikely at one stage to imagine Google would flush Code down the toilet, but if it can happen at the second most valuable company in the tech industry, it can easily happen to a smaller company like Atlassian or GH.

> SourceForge have taken a few missteps in recent months

I'm curious as to why you put this in the past tense. SourceForge never backed down from their actions and continue to use the wrapper.

> someday GH will also exhaust its natural growth and start more aggressive upselling

Acknowledging that GH can go the same way as SourceForge is a very healthy mindset, however, "will" is a strong word because GH has a monetization plan (is always has) - the lack of which is what ultimately caused SF to go down the path that they did.

What GH will or will not do does not deter from what SF is currently doing. Stop looking in your crystal ball and start looking at what is happening in the present.

> It seemed deeply unlikely at one stage to imagine Google would flush Code down the toilet

If you know Google you know this isn't the case. Google are ruthless with cutting ideas and products - just look at Reader. Google realized that Code wasn't making any money, saw that the platform was stagnating and saw that GH was doing a much better job at something that they had never really thought out. Exactly the same situation as SF. Two drastically different approaches to product death.

SourceForge's monetization plan from 2001--2007 was SourceForge Enterprise Edition.

Which, if you squint a bit, looks conspicuously like Github's current monetization plan.

>> It seemed deeply unlikely at one stage to imagine Google would flush Code down the toilet

> If you know Google you know this isn't the case. Google are ruthless with cutting ideas and products - just look at Reader.

Well, yes, it's obvious in hindsight... but Google started Code in 2005 and project hosting in 2006, while Reader was shut down in 2013.

Github wasn't even launched until 2008.

Google Answers 2002-2006 Google Wave 2009-2010 Google Reader 2005-2013 The list goes on

Google has been like this from very early on. I won't be surprised if I wake up to the news that gmail is getting the axe should google decide that the product is no longer commercially viable.

I agree that that particular meme is of little value. However, if a project hosting site begins and continues to wrap project-provided installers with the site's own mal/spyware-delivering installer, whatever good will that site built up over the years is very rapidly burned away.

> I've had to click through more "attack site warning" pages in the past month...

You had to click through those "attack site warning" warnings because Sourceforge was serving malware(!!), not because of community backlash.

> Google have silently dropped SF from their blacklist...

I haven't checked, but that would probably be because SF.net decided to stop serving malware.

> ...someday GH will also exhaust its natural growth and start more aggressive upselling...

And when that day comes, folks will no longer recommend Github for project hosting.

Dice's holding company completely failed to understand the nature of the community that Sourceforge served, and tried to increase revenue by attacking their customer's computers, rather than by hiring folks to rework and redesign the site, add new services, and remove any rough edges on the existing ones.

> it can easily happen to a smaller company like Atlassian or GH.

I work for Atlassian and I agree with the other posters that you're right to be skeptical, but it's worth pointing out that Atlassian has many product offerings other than Bitbucket.

That could end up being part of the problem, if in ten years people are using Jira for project management in non-technical companies, a new management team could see source hosting as an albatross and a mistake of the previous regime.

Despite best efforts, there is no known corporate structure that can protect its' customers from the lack of perspective of future leaders, who will be focused on keeping as much staff employed as possible and delivering profits to investors.

The answer to this used to be places like cdrom.com, but I just checked and they're gone. :)

I have been thinking that something like Yahoo should buy it for a while now.

I thought this update was some kind of reawakening, where sense had prevailed and all malware was removed and Sourceforge was returned to its former glory.

I searched for 'malware', 'spam' in the post and found none.

Son, I am disappoint.