SourceForge and Slashdot Sold

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.