
The Next SourceForge - fintler
http://sourceforge.net/create/
======
rsync
Easy litmus test.

Can I go to a project and immediately find a direct download link that I can
paste into my terminal (for fetch or wget or whatever) ?

Or is it still user-hostile, requiring multiple clicks (pageviews) to get to a
"download link" that gives me some 200 character long, ephemeral-link-
monstrosity that assumes (wrongly) that I want to download their linux source
tarball to my GOD DAMNED LOCAL MACINTOSH.

I'm not even going to bother to look.

~~~
cdmoyer
You know, I went to look at a new project on sourceforge, thinking I'd quickly
prove you wrong. (I don't know why I still have any faith in sourceforge.)

Guess what happened? I clicked on TWO SEPARATE ADS with a download now image
in them.

I captured it because I assume the ads change, but wow, terrible:
[https://www.evernote.com/shard/s3/sh/78c81dc2-0a90-4e0a-8676...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s3/sh/78c81dc2-0a90-4e0a-8676-0d15d9017dc0/36ac37214962b3479348b32b6fec8753?noteKey=36ac37214962b3479348b32b6fec8753&noteGuid=78c81dc2-0a90-4e0a-8676-0d15d9017dc0)

I eventually found the files link, and then clicked a download. And was taken
to download page where I had to wait for my download to start, with some more
ads.

Yeah, screw that.

~~~
snarfy
That screenshot is all I needed to see.

------
Surio
Another thing that's missing in this overall thread is context....

.... context of companies like SF, Yahoo, etc. Basically, SF (Yahoo, etc.) has
been in existence before the days of dropping server costs, dropping bandwidth
costs, dropping storage space costs and before the term _devops_ was even
being used in conversations ;-)

Given this, and the fact that people were still figuring out how to scale and
serve in the 90s, SF (along with Yahoo and some other web pioneers) was going
ahead and practically doing it to scale, and doing it for "free" (if you train
yourself to ignore the irrelevant ads, it is free!). To put this in context,
Github/Bitbucket are all <5 years old by contrast. They've had all the time in
the World to learn from the mistakes of these giants, and use all their
learnings to get things right, and capitalise on EC2/AWS etc. (which was not
possible during SF's setup period) :-)

So, given that some of these companies are the "giants" whose shoulders have
enabled us to come this far, context is very inmportant in trying to
understand these venerable beasts! They may appear to be long in the tooth by
today's standards but they have lent us their shoulders, on whom today's jazz
and pizzazz depend upon.

And for that I will always have a soft spot and gratitude for these internet
pioneers like Yahoo, SF, etc.

EDIT: Also to remember is, the business model around file hosting/repository
management was not the same in the 90s until mid-2000s as it is now, so that
also needs to be kept in context.

P.S: Not affiliated to Sourceforge in any way.

------
andrewguenther
I feel like this is too little too late for Sourcefourge. I can often assume
one of two things when I see a link to a Sourceforge project:

1\. I am going to be redirected to Github or Google Code

2\. The project is dead

At this point, they are just playing catch up.

~~~
slurgfest
To be honest, a link to Google Code is not much different from a SourceForge
link by now.

~~~
rogerbinns
I host my personal projects on Google Code. In contrast to Github it lets you
host files (especially important if not all your users have compilers or
similar tools), and lets you have multiple repositories per project. Pretty
much every hoster does two repositories per project - one for the main source
and a second for the wiki. Having more than two is great. For example for work
stuff I often have Android client and server as different repositories. But
there is no need for them to have separate bug trackers or wikis - for an end
user it is often hard to tell where an issue actually lies and having to copy
issues between client and server side trackers is useless work. Github's issue
tracker lacks being able to prioritise which is highly annoying.

The most annoying problem with Google Code is they refuse to have private paid
for hosting - <https://code.google.com/p/support/issues/detail?id=1829>

Having all our employees create new Github accounts and doing administration
there is a pain when we already do everything else at Google. I suspect paid
project hosting would also help improve Google Code since there would be
revenue behind feature requests and bugs.

~~~
raylu
Minor point: GitHub wiki's have git access.
<https://github.com/[user]/[repo]/wiki/_access>

~~~
rogerbinns
I don't understand what point you are trying to make. As I stated, pretty much
every project hoster has two repositories per project for the code and wiki.
Eg for github you have github.com/[user]/[project].git and
github.com/[user]/[project].wiki.git

With Google Code you can have any number of additional repositories eg the
equivalent of github.com/[user]/[project].documentation.git,
github.com/[user]/[project].testsuites.git,
github.com/[user]/[project].androidclient.git etc

With Github you would have to create new projects which means separate issue
trackers, wikis etc.

------
magic_haze
> font-family:"Helvetica Neue";

Unbelievably sloppy, especially for something introducing a redesign. My
browser is falling back to serif for most of the text... didn't _anyone_ at
sourceforge test it on something not a mac?

~~~
vanderZwan
Well, it's open source so go fix.

~~~
bluehex
While you're at it, please remove those terrible ads too. Thanks!

------
avolcano
SourceForge still has a niche that's significantly different from GitHub or
Google Code: it's made to be somewhat friendly to end-users of large open
source apps. Honestly, I'm surprised they haven't fully pivoted to being an
open source "app store" (with more community features i.e. forums and
support).

~~~
slurgfest
If SourceForge is friendly to anyone, it isn't end users.

There is a lot they could do.

~~~
rdl
It's a lot better than github, IMO. Still not as good as a real project page
with binaries, or ideally just having your package in macports, mac app store,
ubuntu/debian repositories, etc.

~~~
einhverfr
I dunno. I would rather have a page with binaries _plus_ macports, etc. There
are a lot of cases where you may want to reach out to markets not covered by
external repos or where you haven't gotten into every external repo you want
to.

~~~
rdl
Yes, you should have both. Plus ideally presence on GitHub and Sourceforge. (I
also would never use a service as my only repo...)

~~~
einhverfr
(We got into Debian/Ubuntu repos not too long ago but there are still many
more to get into.)

------
marshray
I still see a big green "download" button that is in reality an advertisement
for who-knows-what download manager. <http://twitpic.com/as9agf>
<http://twitpic.com/c60rx5/full>

This is all I need to see to know they haven't really changed.

------
rg3
I think SourceForge was great but we've been spoiled by Github or Bitbucket. I
never minded the ads, which are used to keep the site running, and were a
minor inconvenient to provide access to a huge amount of open source projects,
which was great.

Github and Bitbucket simply provided pages and sites which were easier to
navigate. Specially Bitbucket, which has kept the Downloads section that
Github removed. However, for me, the biggest "feature" that Github and
Bitbucket provided was the ability to create projects easily because (a) the
project name only had to be unique to your own projects instead of globally
and (b) you could simply fill the project name and a brief project description
to create it, instead of having to fill a form with lots of information about
the project area and categories, licenses, development language or
technologies, etc.

Note I haven't used SourceForge for new projects in a long time, so I don't
know if my observations still stand true.

------
bitcartel
Isn't competition great? Contrary to popular opinion, Github isn't the only
game in town.

Assembla: Git, Mercurial, Perforce, Subversion

SourceForge: Git, Mercurial, Subversion

Google Code: Git, Mercurial, Subversion

Bitbucket: Git, Mercurial

Github: Git

~~~
prezjordan
Github: Git, Subversion. [https://github.com/blog/1178-collaborating-on-
github-with-su...](https://github.com/blog/1178-collaborating-on-github-with-
subversion)

~~~
flurdy
Github: Git, Subversion, Mercurial. <http://hg-git.github.com/>

~~~
bitcartel
It's not quite the same as having native hosting of Subversion and Mercurial
repositories. With a bridge and plug-in there might be some edge cases where
things don't work as expected. I wouldn't risk my source code in this way.

------
freeman478
Nice that they are contributing the code to the apache fundation ! Could be a
good Free self hosted alternative to github:enterprise or others

~~~
jurre
Check out <http://gitlabhq.com/> too

~~~
Wicher
And RhodeCode:

<http://rhodecode.org/>

------
SEJeff
I'm sorry guys at VA (Larry Augustine is an ass who sues people. Look up the
OpenVista lawsuit for reference where he sued some of my friends) but if you
want to be new and hip, buy github and dump the sourceforge brand. It was
great once upon a time, but simply doesn't offer what developers are looking
for. As a casual open source dev myself, if I saw a _new_ project using
sourceforge, I'd hold it against them. Why? The sourceforge mailing list
archive web ui is beyond terrible and dealing with the ads and terrible
navigation make it waste my time. Sorry, but a pretty face won't save market
share.

~~~
daveoflynn
Dice.com owns SourceForge now. For a chronology, see Wikipedia:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geeknet#Geeknet>

Dice Holdings (DHX) market cap is ~560m. GitHub is almost certainly worth
more, growing like crazy, and generally almost finished with making SF
irrelevant.

~~~
SEJeff
Oh duh, I'd forgotten about that. One up vote for you sir! Thanks

------
kanzure
Man, when Sourceforge fixed the wget "misfeature" a few years ago, that was
great. They should do more of that.

Every time I hit a Sourceforge page, entire seconds are spent navigating to
the actual page that I want. That's not to say that it's impossible to figure
out how to get to where I want (that status is reserved solely for Launchpad).
Rather, it just takes a lot of time to use Sourceforge. When the seconds are
ticking away, and another page has to load, it's just infuriating. I want at
most two page loads: whatever awful incoming link I came in from, and then the
thing I actually want on the project. I keep forgetting the url structure, so
I can't just type to what I want to get. GitHub and BitBucket have both done
urls particularly well.. you can easily predict the exact url to immediately
see the contents of a file.

Let's examine some Sourceforge urls.

main page: <http://sourceforge.net/projects/docutils/?source=directory>

source code:
[http://sourceforge.net/scm/?type=svn&group_id=38414&...](http://sourceforge.net/scm/?type=svn&group_id=38414&source=navbar)

Oops, wait, no.

real source code: <http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/>

Let's see a file... pick a folder, click a file and you get this:

[http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/trunk/we...](http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/trunk/web/index.txt?view=log)

I know this is viewvc, but who cares. When I click a file, I wanted the file,
not the version history. Why is version history still the default action?
Okay, click on the version and you get the content:

[http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils?view=rev...](http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils?view=revision&revision=7571)

Well, no. This is just a diff. Okay, let's try clicking on the file again
because ???

[http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/trunk/we...](http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/trunk/web/index.txt?view=markup&pathrev=7571)

File contents, at long last! But the real url to get the actual file is
something like this:

[http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/trunk/we...](http://docutils.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/docutils/trunk/web/index.txt)

But does this work for other projects? Well, I seem to remember that FileZilla
was hosted on Sourceforge.. let's see.

<http://filezilla.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/filezilla>

Well, at least that worked. Click around a bit..

[http://filezilla.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/filezilla/FileZi...](http://filezilla.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/filezilla/FileZilla3/trunk/)

Oops, repo moved. Well, let's try another project.

<http://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/phpmyadmin/>

After a bunch of clicking..

[http://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/phpmyadmin/trun...](http://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/phpmyadmin/trunk/phpMyAdmin/user_password.php)

At this point, I think a lot of Sourceforge's problem is viewvc. And the
number of pages in between the project page and the things I need to do. I
think getting rid of viewvc would probably be a huge step forward. Why should
I even have to type viewvc in the first place?

When you don't include viewvc in the url, you get to a directory index (argh):

[http://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/phpmyadmin/trunk/phpMy...](http://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/phpmyadmin/trunk/phpMyAdmin/user_password.php)

But why am I including phpmyadmin in the url again anyway? It's already in the
subdomain. And it's not a folder in the repository... so what's the deal.

BLAH

~~~
arthurdenture
To be fair, it looks like those are all old-style projects. The new platform
-- the one the headline links to -- sucks a lot less. e.g.,
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/allura/>. Source browsing works more like you
would expect and less like ViewVC.

No, I don't know if they have a plan to forcibly upgrade old projects. I wish
they would do so, because the new platform is far less terrible.

~~~
runn1ng
Hm, so, let's look at something more modern.

The project Allura page seems nice, altought I still don't understand why they
have one sort of navigation in "code" view and in "non-code" view, that looks
completely different. Also, the link "Pastebin" displays a 500 error in "non-
code" view (<http://sourceforge.net/p/allura/pastebin/?source=navbar>) but
works in "code" view ( <http://sourceforge.net/p/allura/pastebin/> ) - you
switch "views" by clicking at "Git", apparently. You switch them back by
clicking at "Files" or "Summary".

Why does the Allura project have thousand of badly named branches? (It may be
a goal but it looks confusing from outside.)

Now let's look at some other project that's linked at SF front page

<http://sourceforge.net/projects/weka/>

What's the difference between "Wiki" and "MediaWiki"? Oh, once is inside SF,
the other one directs me somewhere else and tells me it isn't working. Was
that needed?

...why is the code part empty? Is that a bug?

The News are not very new but that's not an error on SF side, I guess.

Overall, I feel like SF jumped 5 years forward - from a site from 10 years ago
to a site from 5 years ago. But I still wouldn't use it for any kind of new
project.

------
Surio
This is what stood out for me.

I am surprised that while so many of the comments are intensely hateful of the
ads, but for a very tech-savvy site, most people actually seem to have no ad-
blockers installed on their browser(s), which takes away virtually _all_ of
the ad problems? With ad-blockers, I find SF is just as smooth to navigate any
any others out there.

~~~
timc3
I don't use an adblocker, because its easier just to not visit sites I don't
like

------
kmfrk
At least it's great for the projects and project owners on the platform.

As competition to GitHub and BitBucket, it just seems sad, frankly. But a
rising tide raises all boats.

------
benwerd
I disliked and migrated away from SourceForge seven or eight years ago.
Although it did let you provide compiled binaries / packages for end users,
the process to do so was ludicrous, and the tools were paper-thin at best.
rsync's comment about the download links are spot on; I can confirm that the
Next SourceForge still gives you the ridiculous go-round when you want to grab
the URL to an install package.

The catalog of software _could_ be great - GitHub doesn't provide this, except
in a developer-friendly format. And maybe this format still works (obviously I
don't know their numbers). But it's slathered in ads and still reminds me of
Tucows - I bet there's a better way to solve this problem.

------
znowi
Now all they have to do is change the name :)

Half joking, but for me, whenever I hear "sourceforge" - it's like a reminder
from the 90s with heavy page loads and arcane user interface. It will take
time to get over it.

------
rubbingalcohol
I don't like to bash on other peoples' hard work, but it seems like their
focus on features and not UX may be a mistake here. The reality is that most
developers use other services now and they need to make a better case for why
I should care about them. More features != more compelling.

Also I think the juxtaposition of the big green "Open Source" logo with "TM"
is very ironic.

~~~
signed0
It is the logo of the Open Source Initiative (<http://opensource.org/>), not
their own.

~~~
rubbingalcohol
How foolish I feel.

------
moe
Sourceforge used to be where code goes to die.

Nowadays it's not even that anymore, I wonder when they will finally shut it
down.

~~~
DelvarWorld
Yeah I was hoping this blog post would be "the next source forge will be us
closing down."

------
foz
The redesign is an improvement, but the usability is still miserable. The main
nav with "solution centers" is really just sponsors. The fake download banners
and links are so misleading.

These attempts to get users to click on links makes my stomach turn. Compared
to Github or Google Code, SourceForge still feels so dishonest. This is open-
source software they are hosting here.

Nine years ago I was a subscriber of SourceForge, because I thought they were
helpful to developers and the communities around projects. I'd never consider
paying them anything these days.

I also found it surprising that Adium is the most popular Financial app.

------
guptaneil
I just visited the Allura project page to check out the new design, and my
eyes had no idea where to look. There's just so much text with no clear
layout. The job ads on the side have the same color and weight as the main
project description, and there's so much extraneous information.

My head starts hurting every time I visit an SF page. Even after this
redesign, I don't see why anybody would use SourceForge for a new project over
GitHub + GitHub Pages for the project page, other than they really hate git.

------
khitchdee
SourceForge needs to integrate with OpenHatch so its easier to get started
with Open Source projects.

------
Mahn
Sourceforge feels a little bit like the Geocities of developers now. Funny how
things go.

------
jakejake
I would like to see otherwise, but SourceForge looks like it could be the
MySpace of code repositories.

I used SourceForge Google Code for several projects and it just seemed like
everybody abandoned ship for GitHub.

------
jff
Why is this site design giving me such intense deja vu? I swear I've seen a
site that looked just like this before. Maybe it's just that all sites look
kind of like this these days.

------
Jleagle
If Google Code can't catch GitHub, then SF definitely wont.

------
seanmcdirmid
Today I learned sourceforge is blocked in China. Yet I feel no rage like I did
when they were blocking github, interesting.

------
mmanfrin
The irony of a trademarked OpenSource logo...

~~~
ward
Eeh, yes and no. I think their ( = Open Source Initiative) main reason for
doing so is to give them the right to pursue sites/companies that would use
their logo while not actually being open source in some sort of attempt to
gain goodwill with the people that would care about it.

You are quite free (<http://opensource.org/trademark-guidelines>) to use their
logo in a lot of cases without the need to contact them at all.

It is not like your average open source advocates are standing on fences
wanting the right to put an "endorsed by apple/google/amazon/..." logo on
their sites.

------
mcmire
So, the next next next next SourceForge, then...

------
languagehacker
Wow! When can I start using it? Oh, not four years ago? Then I think I'll
stick with GitHub.

~~~
dasil003
You would have switched from Github 4 years ago? Not me.

~~~
stevewilhelm
Joined Github Mar 17, 2009. Pretty close.

------
drivebyacct2
Why has it barely been mentioned that the platform powering SF is now open
source?

Don't like the ads? Think it takes too many clicks? Fix it, deploy it.

~~~
efdee
How will that fix the problem at all? Will me changing the source code of my
local copy of the source code somehow lead to the ads disappearing on SF, or
me having to do less clicks when trying to download one of the six projects
that still use SF for their hosting?

