Via FossForce
“With SourceForge, our plans all surround returning the site to being the ‘gold standard’ and most trusted destination for open source software discovery, development, collaboration and distribution on the web. We will improve and accelerate development of useful open source software developer tools in addition to rekindling the original spirit of open source that made SourceForge an industry leader.”
I can’t see this happening. How many things that have lost this much momentum ever climbed back up?1 Especially when the target market is developers.
I think of the code editor changes over the years. Textmate was hugely popular, it lost momentum on the v2 release and never recovered. Eclipse and Netbeans taken over by PhpStorm.
Even BitBucket which is almost on par with GitHub just can’t seem to pick up steam from the open source community. But I know of a lot of consultant shops using it.
I just can’t see how SourceForge will ever return from how bad the name is tarnished. It’ll be an uphill battle and will take coming up with something truly innovative.
- Maybe Vim. It’ll survive the apocolypse. ↩
Eric L. Barnes 
SourceForge was the king and the only place to offer that kind of “free” services. It lasted for years but it’s now at the 3rd sale in less than 10 years. What happened in the meantime? Nothing interesting: if you Google for SourceForge malware or search Reddit for “SourceForge” the only thing you read is: “SourceForge Hijacking Project Accounts [GIMP]” or “Sourceforge has gotten REALLY really bad” or PSA: “Don’t download pidgin from sourceforge.” – most of these searches have hundreds of negative comments. The truth is that it was a suicide mission. It was a slow and painful death for them. I went to read the comments posted on Slashdot regarding the last sale and the new owners promises to “bring it back to the golden age”. Bring what guys? I think the new owner had a bad advisor when they purchased SourceForge. While SourceForge did almost everything to ruin their reputation (fill pages with ads everytwhere, launching devshare programs which delivered adware, run into hundreds of downtimes, use slow mirrors etc.) other services came up and improved. Their latest step when they hijacked accounts was the iceberg (see GIMP, VLC, Audacity and many other projects). Just take a look to “Goodbye, SourceForge” page: https://helb.github.io/goodbye-sourceforge/ and you will see that all of them offers and run things better. I think its impossible for them to reclaim their position. I also read the comments from FossForce article and the best services right-now are FossHub (for regular users and developer) and GitHub (mostly for developers and large projects). How many other similar services will rise in the future? You see, you can’t just say: “Hey, we’re sorry that we did this and that for the last 5 years. It was the old owner fault, we had nothing to do with this.” At this level, any mistake will cost you dearly. If the BizX owner really wanted to launch a similar service it would have a better chance starting from scratch. I feel sorry for them but it will be a good lesson for them. Just my personal opinion.
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Yes totally agree.
I find it odd they’d want to buy it, but maybe the parent company was like if you want Slashdot then Sourceforge comes with it 🙂
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