
Why SourceForge Lost - joshuacc
http://usersinhell.com/why-sourceforge-lost/
======
phuff
Having worked at sf.net for a few years as github was gaining ascendancy, I
would say that we thought about this a lot. And while a lot of the things that
he says are true, they're symptoms of why sf.net lost, not the real reason.

The real reason why sf.net lost was much more fundamental than that. Really it
was so fundamental that it was a business problem rather than a technology
problem. As a company, management just wasn't that interested in competing,
and therefore we didn't have the institutional ability to focus on competing
with some of the things github did.

I am proud to say that it looks like sf.net finally has a fork button, though,
and it also looks (from the outside) like there's some focus on delivering
developer oriented features now on sf.net, so that's a positive thing.

The engineering and ops team that's over there is awesome and has great open
source pedigrees, and has always been super interested in working on things
that would make open source development better and easier, but really has been
hampered from doing that for years by more basic business issues. I think
things might finally be turning around for them, though.

------
programminggeek
Here's another take on this - programmers hate ads and SourceForge is riddled
with them. GitHub isn't.

Also, if I want to setup a repo and put it on GitHub, it's stupidly,
ridiculously easy. SF isn't hard, but it isn't as easy.

Open source software is about PROGRAMMERS collaborating. GitHub makes that
incredibly easy and straightforward. Want to join a project? Fork the code and
tweak til your hearts content. Your code shows up in the network and other
people can find/clone/fork/hack til their hearts are content. Want to
contribute to a SF project? Um... contact the dev and hope the project isn't
dead?

SF is designed to be a kind of Download.com for FOSS. For that it's fine, but
GitHub is designed for developers to share code.

Also, GitHub is great because it also does private code hosting, so if I'm
working on my own stuff or FOSS stuff, I can use GitHub for both. That is
incredibly convenient.

~~~
grandalf
I think that's an understatement. Sourceforge is so bad that for years (well
before Github) I have dreaded downloading anything from it or needing to use
its navigation in any way.

Also, a fair bit of malware has been hosted there over the years and the site
offers no useful search or way of finding what you're looking for.

The initial idea was a good one, but the founder cashed out long ago.

~~~
shailesh
E.g., wget support was broken for a very long time. So, you had to either a.
algorithmically compose a URL or b. navigate to the real download link using
the browser, collating all of them together and then wget -i blah.

These days, it feels much better though.

------
dasil003
You know as much as I hate these terms, I think nothing captures the
undeniable yet intangible difference between SourceForge and GitHub as Web 1.0
vs Web 2.0.

For the younger members here I think it's hard to imagine just how freaking
cool SourceForge was when it first came out. The idea of free, featureful
project hosting was amazing. Back in the 90s, even if you had free hosting,
there wasn't the selection of easy-to-install FOSS web software that we take
for granted today. It's sort of like how cool Slashdot was in a world of
Usenet and BBSes. Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo. It's easy to forget how impressive Web
1.0 was for its time.

GitHub by contast came out of the Web 2.0 era where we had solid CSS, solid
JS/AJAX, solid web frameworks, and a lot of hard-earned knowledge of UX
design, and perhaps more importantly the browser technology to support it. I
think the article makes a good distinction between code hosting and project
hosting, and no doubt that makes GitHub's job easier, but it's not the whole
story. GitHub is the result of a holistic vision that goes from the metal up
to the UI and design bits. In the early days of the web putting together a
team to do something like that was well-nigh impossible. With the ubiquity of
the web today, the new generation of web folks can much more easily pick up
both the technical and design skills to create the kind of amazing UX
experience that sets GitHub apart from SourceForge.

~~~
rubinelli
Sourceforge seems unable to evolve because its business model is stuck in Web
1.0: bring as many visitors as you can and throw as many intrusive ads as
possible in front of them before they can get what they wanted in the first
place and leave.

~~~
killerswan
As far as the terms themselves, O'Reilly was talking about a change in focus
from _software_ to _data_... <http://twit.tv/floss73>

From that angle, then: SourceForge is a great place to download installers,
while GitHub is a great place to get the nitty-gritty details about making a
bit of software.

------
cletus
I would only argue one point in this: Github is _not_ a developer's paradise.
It's good. In fact, it's _really_ good. But it has one huge weakness,
something which all DVCS repositories seem to have followed: they charge per
repository.

This is a terrible pricing model. It should, if anything, be based on per-GB
of storage regardless of repositories. Otherwise it gets hideously expensive
for people to, say, have many small repositories.

It just doesn't make sense that, say, the Linux kernel, and a 500 line
personal Ruby project are equal units as far as Github is concerned.

~~~
jff
Bitbucket charges by "private users". You can host as many open source
projects as you want--many forks of the Linux kernel, for example--for free.
However, if you want a private repository, you can only give read/write access
to 5 people with the free account. <https://bitbucket.org/plans>

That's why I use it for all my projects--I have a Plan 9 kernel fork, an
Inferno OS fork, and a bunch of smaller projects for a total of 13 repos, on
the free plan.

~~~
hugh4life
Even though I prefer mercurial to git, Bitbucket could get a lot of converts
if they started supporting git. Bitbucket is not the serious competition that
I'd like to see Github get. For developers that prefer Hg to Git, Bitbucket
has to compete with Google Code, Codeplex, and others...

April Fools:

<http://blog.bitbucket.org/2009/04/01/announcing-git-support/>

------
hvs
I like Github a lot, and SourceForge has definitely dropped the ball, but is
anyone else tired of linkbait article titles? SourceForge has a _ton_ of
projects still. They didn't "lose" anymore than Github "won". Competition is
trip not a destination. Nothing is for sure, and there's no reason why
SourceForge can't improve their service and take back more of the market.

Us in the tech world need to stop thinking that something needs to "win" and
"lose". It has fueled way to many (idiotic) religious wars about editors,
compilers, and other technologies. Solve problems. Make the world a better
place. And quit trying to find "losers".

/rant

~~~
duskwuff
> SourceForge has a ton of projects still.

That may be true, but I suspect that many, if not most, new projects aren't
created on SourceForge anymore.

Most statistics are lies, of course, but Github currently has 2M repositories
(including forks), as compared to Sourceforge's 300K projects. Seeing as how
SF is over ten years old and Github was launched in 2008, that says to me that
Github's where the real action is now.

~~~
ams6110
How many of those forks contain anything useful, though? Not that most
SourceForge projects aren't abandonware, either.

------
malkia
Sourceforge was always hard for me to use, the standard template (code,
forums, issues, mailing lists, wikis) were hard to set up (my experience) and
use.

GitHub's UI really made impact on me, and the short name, the agenda from the
people (I've seen couple of videos from the founders talking about not github,
but GIT itself).

I still get very lost using git (p4 user at work, so svn feels closer) but
with enough help from github I can see it done.

But all in all github is personal first.

~~~
RossDM
GitHub UI is significantly better. It just works.

Visiting SourceForge feels like going to RapidShare, with all sorts of ads
vying for your attention. Each project has numerous sections which may or may
not have been filled out by the owner. Heaven forbid that they used the
mailing list feature.

~~~
duskwuff
> Heaven forbid that they used the mailing list feature.

Or the bug tracker. Ulch!

~~~
loevborg
Or the mailing list archive software they use, which must be the worst of a
bunch of very bad ones. It seems incredible that there is no halfway decent
way to view mailing list archives (mailman's html pages don't count).

------
StavrosK
> Firstly, it’s _not_ because GitHub’s front-end is nicer

Nope, I'm pretty sure that's the reason.

~~~
scott_s
My mind got snagged on that, too, and it wouldn't let go. The rest of his
arguments are not wrong, but I think they fit under that umbrella. That is,
it's because GitHub's front-end is nicer, and it's front-end is nicer because
SourceForge is oriented around projects and GitHub is oriented around code.
The change in focus enables a better presentation.

~~~
astrodust
It's not that Github's CSS is better, or their graphics are better, but that
their design is better, and design encompasses everything, top to bottom. Most
things on Github feel effortless, and even the tricky things are far from
frustrating. This is evidence that they care, and that care shows in that the
graphics and CSS are very well done.

Good design doesn't start with appearance, it ends with it.

~~~
evilduck
In _Startups Open Sourced_ , Tom Preston-Warner is interviewed and says to
design every detail of every page of a project before touching any code. While
graphic design and technical design are very intertwined, I think in Github's
case the graphic design came first, or was at least equally weighted. I don't
know how SourceForge came to be, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out the
backend was designed before the front end design.

~~~
nitrogen
IIRC, the general wisdom during SourceForge's heyday _was_ to design the
backend before the frontend. I recall reading a zen programmer story about
someone writing a finance package, who was mocked by the "wise" programmer for
designing and writing the UI first, before having any finance-related code.

------
Sandman
I don't have a repo on GitHub and while it may certainly be better than SF
(and probably is, judging by the comments here), I have to take issue with the
overall quality of this article.

First of all, when I started reading the article, I genuinely expected that it
would be a good analysis of why GitHub surpassed Sourceforge, but instead it
read like a GitHub fanboy's rant about how much cooler GitHub is. Some of the
things said about SF are simply not true, for example, one of his main points
- that if you host your project on SF, your project page is your website and
that's it, the only other way to have a website is to host it elsewhere.
That's simply not true. SF does provide web hosting, and your domain name is
not some convoluted URL, it's "yourprojectname.sourceforge.net".

The author of the article states that GitHub is a "code host". But what does
that mean, is SF also not a "code host"? Does it not hold your code in a repo?
Except that besides doing that, it also offers a plethora of other services.
They might not be the best there are, but hey, they're here, and if you don't
want to use them, don't. Want to have a forum hosted by SF? Ok, you can do
that. Want to have it somewhere else? No problem, host it elsewhere. Nobody's
forcing you. It seems that the author is somehow trying to turn the fact that
GitHub _doesn't_ have these features into an advantage for GitHub.

The thing is, this could have really been a good article. There are a number
of reasons why devs move away from SourceForge. Unfortunately, the article
makes no mention of them. SF's frequent downtime is one of those reasons. The
general slowness and unresponsiveness of the site is another. There are good
reasons why people are leaving SourceForge. Just not those that the author of
this article mentions.

------
__david__
I can say personally that the only reason I use GitHub and would never
consider SourceForge is because of the D in DVCS. SourceForge always wanted to
be your world: You have to give your repo over to them and let them manage it
on their servers. By doing that you are now locked in to their world.

With git I don't care if GitHub goes down for a month or accidentally loses
all my code or kicks me out and starts to charge for hosting. It's because
they are hosting a _copy_ of my repo and are not the sole keeper. I _always_
have my repo with my precious source code history and it's impossible for them
to take it away.

I suspect a lot of hackers are like myself and don't like giving up control
where they don't have to.

That and GitHub just doesn't feel as hostile as SourceForge.

------
elmindreda
SF.net lost because the site is incredibly slow, it's usability is somewhere
between "whatever" and "bend over", they keep moving things around for no
apparent benefit and for quite a while the site assumed visitors weren't
potential contributors.

I started hosting code there using CVS in 2000 and it has certainly improved
since then, but I recently pushed a branch to GitHub and there's just no
comparison.

------
Meai
It's absolutely astonishing to me that nobody ever mentions how Github handles
viewing code. I always thought it's painfully obvious why Github won. They
make viewing code easy. Duh. They have that nice little animation of code
sliding in which lets me think that I'm not waiting forever, and I can
actually navigate and explore other people's code.

I may overestime myself a little here, but I'm pretty sure that's the
main/only reason Github succeeded. Not some new pricing scheme.

~~~
xtal
If I had to attribute GitHub's success to one thing, it's that animation.

------
vrruiz
The first battle SourceForge lost was against Google Code hosting. Google
offered a nicer interface and had some features SourceForge hasn't, the most
important one, subversion.

SourceForge, like other sites managed by VA Linux/SF/Geeknet, has a terrible
record of user friendliness. How many Slashcode-based sites are still running?

------
maratd
The key is that GitHub understands open source. People who write open source
aren't magical. We still need food and that means a j-o-b. You can have your
public open source code and your private proprietary code right next to each
other, in the same place. How brilliant is that?

~~~
phuff
Sourceforge was definitely created in an era when open source was much more
project oriented (think, Samba, gnome, python, etc.) and back then it didn't
make as much sense to have open source + closed source code side by side. But
things have fundamentally shifted with regards to how open source software is
created and sf.net definitely hasn't made the shift as smoothly as it should
have.

------
nelhage
One key point that I think this article missed is the activation energy
required to create a new project. On SourceForge, at least when I last used
it, it was a very involved, explicit process, where you created a new project
and went through several screens of populating license, status, etc., and then
you finally had a place where you could stick code.

Whereas github lets you get a repo up and running with just about a single
click and a 'git push', and then add on features and information as you grow.
So it became the place to stick all of your one-off, throwaway, or
experimental code, which got developers in the habit of using it, and it also
had the room to grow if once of those things grew into a "real" project.

------
stewbrew
"Using a SourceForge page as your project’s homepage is fine in the early
days. But once you get big enough, it’s just not enough. The URL is long and
doesn’t seem permanent; the landing page is modular and boring, and it doesn’t
really convey that much information about your project. It looks like every
other SourceForge project page."

It seems to me the author doesn't know sf.net too well. sf.net does still
quite well for hosting web pages. I don't know pidgin but I wouldn't be too
surprised if the homepage is hosted at sf.net and if pidgin.im simply is an
alternative address for pidgin.sf.net. They (sf.net) are notorious for their
downtimes though.

------
maaku
When I created a SF project some years ago, it required approval from some
mysterious and unknown administrator. That process took a week, and during
that time I didn't have access to the resources I needed (version control,
mailing list, issue tracker, etc.) to get my project off the ground.

Things may have changed since, but I wouldn't know because I never came back.

~~~
phuff
Yeah, we got rid of that process at least 3 years ago when I was still there.
There's some after the fact attempt to not allow spam projects, but you can
get started right away now (thankfully, that was a super slow process).

------
Joakal
One part where SourceForge wins and GitHub doesn't is executables can be
downloaded.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
And mailing lists. The day that GitHub allows me to create and manage mailing
lists for my projects is the day I can finally tell sourceforge to burn in
hell.

~~~
jff
Just run them through Google Groups, it's extremely convenient. I host my
project on bitbucket and run the dev list on Google Groups.

