
The State of SourceForge Since Its Acquisition in January - tomaac
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_of_sourceforge_since_its_acquisition_in/
======
AdmiralAsshat
They 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.

~~~
digi_owl
> 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.

------
toyg
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.

~~~
pdw
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.

~~~
sp332
Yeah, GitHub is not a great user experience if you just want to download the
installer for some program.

~~~
digi_owl
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.

------
StevePerkins
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.

~~~
EdHominem
> 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?

------
brett40324
This is a win for the Web, whether they gain market share or not.

------
kyriakos
sounds like the new owners understand the mistakes of their predecessors.

~~~
IE6
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.

~~~
loganabbott
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.

~~~
5ilv3r
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.

~~~
reitanqild
> 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.

~~~
5ilv3r
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.

------
fenesiistvan
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).

~~~
loganabbott
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.

