[HN Gopher] How GitHub replaced SourceForge as the dominant code...
___________________________________________________________________
How GitHub replaced SourceForge as the dominant code hosting
platform
Author : fosterfriends
Score : 147 points
Date : 2024-03-30 13:18 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (graphite.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (graphite.dev)
| Jenk wrote:
| After skim reading I couldn't see it mentioned, but when
| SourceForge started bundling malware[0][1] into the software they
| hosted, it was their death toll.
|
| [0]: https://neverworkintheory.org/2022/04/21/decline-of-
| sourcefo...
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31110206
|
| As my memory recalls it, that triggered an exodus to Google Code,
| and whilst GH was gaining traction it was somewhat in their
| shadow. When Google announced they were going to kill Code that
| was the blessing for GH.
| fulafel wrote:
| Also lots of people were using other VCSes like Mercurial and
| SVN. Representative of the times is eg this blog post about
| Mercurial on Google Code
| http://blog.dreasgrech.com/2010/07/managing-google-code-proj...
|
| (Well, lots of people still are, but Git usage grew quite fast)
| asabla wrote:
| This is how I remembered it as well.
|
| Kind of preferred Google Code over GitHub for a while. Or at
| least until it had enough functionality and/or tools to support
| it.
|
| Almost feels like it's time again for a shift...but it will
| probably be a while
| 3seashells wrote:
| We are in that phase we're non ms incompatible features will
| be added to mgit and the flesh eating plant slowly closes
| shut.
| a_random_canuck wrote:
| Honestly it's been time for a shift ever since they were
| bought by Microsoft...
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It would be good if they gitlab and gitea standardised some
| features such as how to track issues in a repo, to make a
| baseline of portability available. Then they can say migrate
| to one of us from GitHub using this special tool, and then
| you'll have a nice portable repo from then on.
|
| That might help a little with the transition, ready for when
| MS does one of their crazy moves and people suddenly want to
| switch.
| baryphonic wrote:
| Yep, that's when I quit downloading from SourceForge as well
| samtho wrote:
| This was so mind-boggling even at the time that SourceForge
| thought it could leverage its market position to force adware
| and other nonsense upon its users and get away with it, which
| itself the last straw in a string of other abuses they
| subjected users to on the website. It is also so arrogant and
| presumptive to think that the developers, who's projects were
| hosted here, would put up with their distribution platform
| bundling junk with their software.
|
| This was a mortal sin for them, and rightfully so, whereby it
| became impossible to recover the damage to their reputation.
| Like, what were they thinking? Did they know they were doomed
| and just wanted one final ad sale? It's just an egregious abuse
| of whatever dwindling power they had which permanently
| destroyed what little trust that the developers had for them -
| the same group of people that provided the only real value (for
| free, even) that SourceForge held.
| sc68cal wrote:
| Most likely management wanted more monetization and didn't
| listen to anyone who pushed back and said that bundling
| adware was a bad idea.
| cced wrote:
| Seriously.
|
| > We will bundle adware with your downloads.
|
| I guess I can't download using your download site anymore?
|
| > surprised_pikachu.jpg
| justinclift wrote:
| > This was so mind-boggling even at the time that SourceForge
| thought ...
|
| They'd been recently bought by a shitty company called DICE
| that also owned ummm... CNet or Download.com, or some other
| similar place with lots of downloads for Windows users:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice.com
|
| *
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Adware_controversy
|
| That company already served ~malware~ sorry "bundled third
| party offers" with their windows downloads, and figured
| they'd be able to copy-n-paste that approach to popular OSS
| downloads.
|
| That's not how it played out however, as some of us actually
| give a shit about things like that. ;)
| akira2501 wrote:
| It was a funny and gross moment shortly after the
| corporation I was working at had acquired CNet where every
| IT department was notified by corporate IT that
| download.com was not a reliable site and should _never_ be
| used to download software into the company.
| outop wrote:
| That's the company that bought Slashdot isn't it?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Yup.
|
| /. is a faint shadow of what they once were.
|
| TBF, it wasn't just Dice. At that time, CNN and Yahoo (I
| think) nuked their trollgard- er, comments, and they all
| went to slashdot. It became _the_ place to go, for top-
| quality Nazi ASCII art.
| greenavocado wrote:
| In the mad, wild world of 2015, SourceForge, once the high
| priest of open-source sanctuaries, turned to the dark arts,
| conjuring a storm of controversy that would rattle its sacred
| halls. This wasn't your grandma's repository anymore; it
| became a bizarre bazaar, peddling adware and malware
| alongside its trove of treasures, much to the horror of its
| loyal acolytes. They were slipping digital demons into
| downloads, especially those forsaken projects left to gather
| dust in the corners of the internet, turning a once-hallowed
| ground into a haunted house.
|
| Enter the DevShare program, a Faustian bargain if there ever
| was one. It whispered sweet nothings into the ears of
| developers, promising them a slice of the pie if they let
| these third-party gremlins hitch a ride with their creations.
| But here's the twist - SourceForge, in a move that would make
| Machiavelli blush, didn't always wait for a nod of approval.
| They shadow-copied projects, dolled them up with their
| unwanted baggage, and pushed them onto the unsuspecting
| masses as the real deal.
|
| Who masterminded this descent into madness? The suits at
| SourceForge under the banner of Dice Holdings, who else?
| Names weren't named, but the open-source warriors and
| keyboard knights didn't need a who to channel their fury at
| the sacrilege committed against their digital Eden.
|
| But as the adage goes, "It's always darkest before the dawn,"
| and so it was for SourceForge. By 2016, under the new flag of
| BIZX, LLC, a wind of change blew through its realm. The
| DevShare program, that deal with the devil, was slain, laid
| to rest in the hopes of resurrecting the platform's lost
| glory. The new overlords vowed a return to the old ways, a
| purge of the parasitic practices, aiming to restore faith in
| the digital congregation and bring back the prodigal
| programmers.
|
| SourceForge's saga is a testament to the eternal battle for
| the soul of the internet, a reminder that even in the digital
| age, the pen (or the code) is mightier than the sword (or the
| adware).
| stuart73547373 wrote:
| prodigal means wasteful. otherwise, beautiful.
| outop wrote:
| To be fair to them there are still a few projects which are
| still hosted on SF, in some cases it's the only place you can
| find specific legacy projects.
|
| So if their calculation was that all of open source would
| stay on their platform with them adding malware, they were
| wrong. But if the calculation was that a long tail of random
| small and semi-orphaned projects would stay there after the
| big popular projects had all migrated, providing them with
| essentially free revenue for a very long time, they were kind
| of right.
| ajdude wrote:
| I kept reading the article waiting for this lede but it never
| came. That's what ultimately left a sour taste in my mouth back
| in the SourceForge days.
| sydd wrote:
| Also their site was fill with intrusive ads, the repo browser
| was crap. GitHub was fast, no ads, markdown rendering and a
| decent repo browser.
|
| Also the main advantage of git was local copies, so the source
| code was more safe. And speed SVN was slow for large repos. At
| my first place we had an SVN server in the server room, when
| it's hard drive crashed no one could work for a day :)
|
| Still people hated git first because it was much more
| complicated with it's branches, PRs etc
| jwells89 wrote:
| Yes, your first paragraph is the big standout in my memory.
| GitHub and Google Code were clean, uncluttered, and focused
| in a way that SourceForge was very much not. Almost what
| Google was to Excite, Lycos, etc in the early 2000s.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| What were Google's reasons for shutting down Code?
| outop wrote:
| Same as their reason for shutting down all their other
| projects. They only ever existed as a distraction for
| their underemployed workforce and as part of the PR that
| they have a mission other than pulling cash out of their
| personal-data-monetising advertising monopoly, forever.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| IIRC when Google Code was announced to be closing, the
| Microsoft equivalent (CodePlex) was the next location a lot of
| projects moved to. It had a decent UI and supported Mercurial
| in addition to Git.
|
| When MS also announced they were closing that and offering a
| tool to migrate to GitHub, was when GitHub (and Git) truly
| became the biggest remaining option.
|
| The other aspect of SourceForge's decline was that they doubled
| down on the sketchy site feeling right as acceptance of such
| sites was on the decline, the likes of mediafire, zippyshare
| etc were being replaced with cloud storage providers and
| download aggregators were losing popularity (in part due to
| also becoming very sketchy and prone to pushing malware). They
| might've been able to get away with it a few years earlier. I
| remember that back then it wasn't a huge deal to follow a
| mediafire download link from somewhere that seemed reliable
| enough, whereas nowadays it'd be an immediate red flag due to
| the abundance of more legitimate seeming file sharing options.
| VonGuard wrote:
| People used Codeplex? I thought it was just this crazy
| halfstep Sam Ramji convinced MS to take, leading them to open
| source. When it launched, Codeplex was supposed to be a
| source code museum, where you could see the code but not
| reuse it. Crazy I know, but it was what MS was comfortable
| with at the time, and a few years later they opened .NET.
| Codeplex was like an experiment to get MS to touch open
| source code and feel comfortable with it at a legal level,
| not a replacement for Sourceforge...
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Around those times I was mostly a .NET kid and most of the
| .NET projects I remember looking at were on CodePlex, so
| maybe my perspective is a little distorted.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| Your perspective is in my experience not distorted.
| Programming is not a unique culture, but divided into
| multiple subcultures. Projects that were nearer to the
| .NET or Windows programming culture indeed often chose
| CodePlex instead of GitHub while there was a choice.
| ksherlock wrote:
| My recollection is that google code had been dead for a
| number of years when somebody remembered it was still a thing
| and then shut it off in 2016.
|
| Google was already using GitHub ("To meet developers where
| they are, we ourselves migrated nearly a thousand of our own
| open source projects from Google Code to GitHub.") and added
| an "export to GiHub" button on google code. Maybe if you were
| .net you went to codeplex but most everyone else (including
| Google) went to GitHub, if they weren't already there.
|
| https://opensource.googleblog.com/2015/03/farewell-to-
| google...
| pipes wrote:
| I used Google code. Then it announced it's closure either
| Google code or GitHub provided tools to import projects in to
| GitHub. I can't remember which. But I did that.
| Macha wrote:
| Sourceforge was already long over in mindshare by that point,
| it basically just convinced most of the few remaining holdouts
| at that point. (With a few notable exceptions, like FileZilla)
| veidr wrote:
| That's how I remember it too, with the additions that they also
| did a bunch of additional shit like show early-stage
| surveillance ads, and sign you up for unwanted mail lists by
| default, and more, but all less-awful than the installation of
| unwanted spamware).
|
| My dad runs his company accounting on GnuCash, and I sometimes
| help him set up a computer, and it is always startling that
| SourceForge even exists. (It's still the official download[1].)
|
| [1]: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/
|
| P.S. I think you meant "death knell" but it's all good, we all
| understood. :)
| sdwr wrote:
| Death knell is the killing blow (or harbinger of?)
|
| Death rattle refers to a rattling noise produced in the lungs
| with one's dying breaths.
|
| Both applicable, death rattle is a little bit more
| appropriate though, because it's an action that sourceforge
| took.
| cshimmin wrote:
| Literally, a death knell is a bell rung (esp by a church)
| to indicate someone has died. Figuratively it's an event
| that signals an end to something.
| Jenk wrote:
| > P.S. I think you meant "death knell" but it's all good, we
| all understood. :)
|
| You are correct, I garbled it with "[death] bell toll"
| (specifically thinking of "for whom the bell tolls.")
| jzb wrote:
| The bundling thing happened after Sourceforge was already well
| in decline, 2013, which was five years after GitHub launched.
| Google Code shutdown was announced 2015. IIRC Sourceforge was
| becoming less relevant because it hadn't introduced git
| support, and GitHub answered that demand. By the time it added
| it, it was too late.
|
| Bundling adware with software was not the death knell for
| Sourceforge, it was a death rattle - though the corpse is
| livelier than I'd have thought ten-plus years later.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Hm, it feels the adware was a bit later, or rather I should
| be surprised how early sourceforge fell into irrelevance in
| my circles. When it made the news I was pretty much just
| shrugging "well nobody's using that anymore anyways"
|
| It's just one of the examples where somebody came along
| offering pretty much the same thing but just with a different
| focus (code/collab), and arguably also relevant a cleaner,
| fresher look.
| neilv wrote:
| IIRC, Sourceforge's reputation was being tarnished even before
| the malware. Sourceforge had some kind of data loss incident,
| whereupon open source developers I knew started referring to it
| as "Sourceforget".
|
| Later, one day someone said in a group of Linux developers,
| "So, Linus made a version control system...", kinda amused. I
| didn't know whether Torvalds was actually going to use it for
| Linux, and didn't even consider that it might be adopted by
| pretty much all software developers of any kind.
|
| It was even named "git", like it was aggressively trying to be
| unmarketable.
|
| But at some point, GitHub emerged, and grew a very favorable
| reputation. Then they sold out.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| > Then they sold out.
|
| Ah, finally someone recollects the original.
|
| People look at me funny when I tell them it wasn't an
| Microsoft creation.
| Affric wrote:
| Christ I am old
| awill wrote:
| It is mind boggling that Google has given up on so many
| potential businesses like code because they didn't think the
| market was big enough.
| pipes wrote:
| A few years ago I recall the new CEO sort of relaunched source
| forge on hacker news and seemed very keen to listen to
| feedback. I wonder what ever happened with that.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| For me (I used to use SF), it was as simple as it took SF years
| to adopt Git, and I liked Git a lot more than SVN.
|
| At the time, GH was pretty much the best expression of hosted
| Git out there.
| wslh wrote:
| Yes, I didn't remember a continuum between SF and GitHub but
| the obvious demise of SF et al (Greshmeat, Slashdot, etc).
| stevekemp wrote:
| My overriding memories of SourceForge was that it was slow,
| buggy, and hard to use.
|
| There were mailing lists, issue-trackers, forums, and similar
| things but each page load took like five seconds and the site was
| ugly.
|
| I switched from using it after it got a reputation for wrapping
| downloads with malware, or with "toolbar helpers", etc. I'm sure
| the projects had to sign up to it at the start, but it always
| felt abusive.
|
| Back then there was some discovery options, but of course I
| browsed freshmeat[.net] back in the day to see announcements of
| new releases, or new projects.
|
| Github won for being useful and awesome, but also SourceForge
| lost because of self-sabotage, stagnation, and neglect.
|
| (Wasn't there a buyout at some point? With Slashdot/others being
| bought by Dice? I know SF.net has changed hands a couple of
| times, but that was the first one I remember in 2012 or so? That
| probably didn't help)
| MBCook wrote:
| I don't remember ever _liking_ SourceForge, it was simply the
| thing that existed.
|
| Not a lot of surprise something else was able to outcompete
| them with new ideas.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| >even up until 2010, many companies were still hosting code on
| SVN
|
| I spent part of today choreographing the first part of a massive
| 30,000,000 LOC SVN to Git migration for my employer with ESR's
| (phenomenal!) `reposurgeon`. Never underestimate the long tail of
| database usage, even code data. (Any port in a storm, of course,
| I'll take Subversion than no VC at all any day of the week.)
|
| Learning this aggressively and increasingly niche skillset is why
| I wrote https://andrew-quinn.me/reposurgeon/ earlier this week. I
| had trouble even finding SVN repos in the wild to practice
| conversion on.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| subversion was well-loved by its loyal users at the time as
| part of "net culture"; speaking of SVN any other way is
| revisionist. Meanwhile, plenty of companies sold proprietary
| source code control, since forever; few people loved those
| products as rigor and management were the constant, user-
| oriented features not so much, and there was no sense of
| community or user-control in sight.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| That makes some sense. A lot of the other technical decisions
| made in the early days of the company were surprisingly well-
| considered in retrospect, so at a time when it's either SVN
| or e.g. BitKeeper, a reasonable person would probably also
| want to stick with SVN.
| veidr wrote:
| As somebody old enough to a.) have used svn, and b.) only
| fully migrated everything to git in 2010:
|
| Subversion:CVS was like NVMe-SSD:HDD, and Subversion:Perforce
| was like SATA-SSD:HDD.
|
| Git:Subversion is more like RTX2080:RTX3080, or, say, '78
| Datsun 2080Z:'93 Acura Integra.
|
| BETTER, yes, sure, yes.
|
| OMFGIGOTTASWITCHNOW!!!!, not really.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| this hits one important point- git is very bad with large
| files, and all the "solutions", like git-lfs, are weird cludges
| vundercind wrote:
| - Sourceforge had become terrible in multiple ways. They weren't
| actually a competitor anymore with any competently-run hosting
| site.
|
| - lightweight site, no ads
|
| - either had tons of features sourceforge didn't or sourceforge's
| site was bad enough I never noticed the features
|
| - gave me, and companies, a reason to create an account and
| actually _engage_ with it--I think maybe sourceforge was one of
| those sites that required login for larger downloads (hazy
| recollection, may be wrong) but I certainly never used it for
| anything else, if I had an account. GitHub? Issue tracker on
| repos for software you use, free hosting even just for
| unimportant junk repos (all I've ever had, myself), maybe sending
| the odd PR, having an account is nice and they didn't even need
| to break out the stick to make it nice (though now they have,
| because normal and non-aggressive use of their site will get you
| rate-limited very fast without an account--jerks, forcing me to
| log in even if I'm just searching for something real quick and
| don't need any logged-in features)
| codexb wrote:
| Yeah, IMO, sourceforge and github never competed. Sourceforge
| was a place to host installers for windows shareware. Github
| basically created its own market. It was really competing with
| the millions of private SVN servers. When git became the new
| hotness, anyone who researched it realized they could just use
| github instead of having to stand up their own git server. It
| was a zero cost trial of git, and basically everyone chose git
| over svn and just stuck with github.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| The main lesson I took from the SF->GH transition was to never,
| ever put my marbles in a bag owned by someone else again. I'm
| happy that GH is there to act as a totally public repo-website,
| and will happily auto-mirror to it, but I'll always self-host
| when it comes to the canonical repository for any project I'm
| nominally in charge of.
| saurik wrote:
| If GitHub just would support CNAMEs--like being able to tell it
| "git.saurik.com" is the canonical host for "github.com/saurik"
| --this would be a lot more reasonable :(. We even live in a
| future where it would be trivial for them to have this work
| with SSL (which wasn't the case yet when I started calling for
| CNAME support back when GitHub first came out).
| Applejinx wrote:
| Wouldn't this then make it trivial for you to spin up a
| separate host, do some git wizardry to clone everything from
| your local copy to that separate host, edit the CNAME, and
| redirect away from the Microsoft-provided hosting with no
| issues?
|
| ...
|
| I mean, yes that's literally the idea, but you do see why
| it's not happening?
| nomilk wrote:
| Code hosting seems to be a natural monopsony. Github does a good
| job by and large, and it would be a bit of a PITA for users to
| have to navigate a bunch of similar, competing websites for no
| substantial additional benefit.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Why? I never have any trouble bouncing between GitHub, Gitlab,
| Gitea instances, SourceHut instances, cgit servers... You can
| just git clone and away you go.
| Macha wrote:
| It's true as a user that switching is relatively easy.
|
| As a contributor it's a little harder, more so for stuff with
| non standard processes like sourcehut or cgit.
|
| As a maintainer there can be much more significant
| differences around bundled features like CI systems and issue
| trackers. (Though I am of the opinion that where possible, CI
| should just be calling makefile steps or your language's
| tooling equivalent)
|
| However, I agree that this is ultimately not a huge barrier.
|
| Despite that, it's clear that users won't cross that barrier.
| As a project maintainer on not-github, you'll get less
| attention, less feedback, less contributions on other
| platforms. I think there's a bit of a relation to how sticky
| services like search engines are despite 0 barrier to
| switching.
|
| So that's something that you will need to weight up when
| choosing a platform, regardless of whether you as maintainer
| have difficulty doing the switch or think others do.
|
| Maybe maximising contributions isn't an important goal for
| you, but I can see why many projects before have made that
| decision.
| zilti wrote:
| > stuff with non standard processes like sourcehut
|
| Of all the forges, Sourcehut arguably has the most standard
| processes - mailing lists for issues, and git-send-email
| for contributions. I especially love the latter, because it
| means I don't have to register and create a repo fork etc.
| just to contribute a patch.
| jasode wrote:
| A few notable projects where the canonical repo is still on
| SourceForge instead of moving to Github:
|
| - LAME mp3 : https://sourceforge.net/projects/lame/
|
| - KeePass : https://sourceforge.net/projects/keepass/
|
| (Some people keep asking the KeePass developer to move to Github
| but he doesn't want to because _" I'm not going to maintain a
| version control system."_ :
| https://sourceforge.net/p/keepass/discussion/329221/thread/9...)
|
| Any other notable examples besides those 2?
| pitaj wrote:
| Nuts that any significant open source project would choose to
| not use any kind of version control, especially nowadays.
| eep_social wrote:
| SourceForge offers hosting of git, mercurial, and svn repos.
| I found a compressed bundle of the latest KeePass source in a
| few seconds of clicking. Can you clarify?
|
| Edit: or downvote, sure!
| criddell wrote:
| If you click through the keepass links one or two levels,
| you eventually find that the keepass developer apparently
| doesn't use version control software. They weren't saying
| SourceForge doesn't offer it.
| hiddencost wrote:
| "please trust my security software"
|
| "I won't do work to have a VCS"
|
| Yikes.
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| Well, the whole matter with "xz" this week would not have
| happened without public DVCS.
| intelkishan wrote:
| XAMPP is on still on SourceForge, but I am not sure if it's
| still widely used.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Any other notable examples besides those 2?
|
| Lazarus, I think.
| rogeliodh wrote:
| intel drivers: https://sourceforge.net/projects/e1000/
| pquki4 wrote:
| I remember every time I need to get the tigerVNC Viewer I had
| to go to sourceforge.
| markphip wrote:
| Something this misses is that the mentality of OSS was just
| different before GitHub.
|
| The thought from the original growth of OSS was that it would be
| more about the community than the code. So OSS would be a series
| of communities that would each have their own "identity" for
| their community. There were big OSS foundations like Apache and
| Eclipse. Sun had several like java.net, OpenOffice.org and
| netbeans.org. Gnome had their own place etc.
|
| Like Sun, other enterprises like HP, Oracle and IBM were setting
| up their own communities for their projects and to collaborate
| with partners.
|
| And then as the post touches on there were sites like
| SourceForge, Tigris.org, Google Code and Microsoft had something
| too (CodePlex?). These sites were places projects might spin up
| if they did not belong at one of the other foundations and wanted
| a place to host their code for free. Of these SourceForge was
| often used for distribution of binaries due to its vast mirror
| network and often that was all that was hosted there and the
| project was elsewhere.
|
| Anyway, until GitHub sprang up and started to consolidate all the
| OSS in one place, I do not think anyone else was even really
| trying to do this. Obviously the rise of git played a big role in
| this. This change fueled the growth of OSS but it did kind of
| come at the cost of losing out on some of the community aspects
| that existed before in the mailing lists and forums of these
| other places. Now collaboration all happens in PR's and Issue and
| is often just between a small handful of people.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| The other thing this is missing is that SourceForge reviewed
| your project before giving you a place to host it. You also
| didn't get a nice URL back when everyone was really focused on
| having nice URLs (right before GitHub). Those two factors are
| shallow, but they made a lot of friction that GitHub
| eliminated.
| a_random_canuck wrote:
| And it reeeeeeally makes me uneasy that all this OSS is
| effectively in the hands of Microsoft.
| Culonavirus wrote:
| Yea, that aspect is kinda scary. But hey, at least it's not
| in the hands of Google.
| What2159 wrote:
| Google is benevolent but incompetent. Microsoft is evil but
| competent. Difficult choice.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > Google is benevolent
|
| Honest dumb question, how is Google benevolent in
| comparison to MS these days?
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Agreed. "Google is good and Microsoft is evil" is a take
| from two decades ago.
| pimlottc wrote:
| I don't know that this is true, but to even suggest that
| Microsoft is the component one vs Google really shows how
| much things have changed in the last 20 years...
| samtho wrote:
| Google is indifferent, almost worse than evil - which can
| be predictable.
| nottorp wrote:
| Tbh i'd rather have my code somewhere where my account
| can't be automatically banned by an "AI" without any
| possibility of reaching a human...
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Google was never benevolent, no for-profit business is. It
| was baffling to me how many developers took "Don't be evil"
| at face value, particularly for an almost completely
| advertising funded (i.e. highly motivated for
| enshittification) corporation.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > It was baffling to me how many developers took "Don't
| be evil" at face value
|
| In my opinion a little bit more care must be taken here:
|
| The "don't be evil" slogan was in my opinion both a
| blessing and a curse for Google: a blessing in that
| people initially trusted that Google does not intend to
| do something evil; a curse in the sense that when they
| started doing things that were considered "evil", it lead
| to a massive reputation damage for Google.
| myself248 wrote:
| Google was benevolent, but DoubleClick was evil.
|
| Slapping the Google name over the DoubleClick business
| model was the greatest swindle ever pulled, and people
| STILL don't see through it.
| greenavocado wrote:
| In the neon-lit, digitized colosseum of the 21st century, two
| titans lock horns, casting long shadows over the earth.
| Google and Microsoft, behemoths of the digital age, engaged
| in an eternal chess match played with human pawns and privacy
| as the stakes. This isn't just business; it's an odyssey
| through the looking glass of corporate megalomania, where
| every move they make reverberates through society's fabric,
| weaving a web of control tighter than any Orwellian
| nightmare.
|
| Google, with its 'Don't Be Evil' mantra now a quaint echo
| from a bygone era, morphs the internet into its own
| playground. Each search, a breadcrumb trail, lures you deeper
| into its labyrinth, where your data is the prize - packaged,
| sold, and repackaged in an endless cycle of surveillance
| capitalism. The search engine that once promised to organize
| the world's information now gatekeeps it, turning knowledge
| into a commodity, and in its wake, leaving a trail of
| monopolized markets, squashed innovation, and an eerie echo
| chamber where all roads lead back to Google.
|
| Meanwhile, Microsoft, the once-dethroned king of the digital
| empire, reinvents itself under the guise of cloud computing
| and productivity, its tentacles stretching into every facet
| of our digital lives. From the operating systems that power
| our machines to the software that runs our day, Microsoft's
| empire is built on the sands of forced obsolescence and
| relentless upgrades, a Sisyphean cycle of consumption that
| drains wallets and wills alike. Beneath its benevolent
| surface of helping the world achieve more lies a strategy of
| dependence, locking society into a perpetual embrace with its
| ecosystem, stifling alternatives with the weight of its
| colossal footprint.
|
| Together, Google and Microsoft architect a digital
| Panopticon, an invisible prison of convenience from which
| there seems no escape. Their decisions, cloaked in the
| doublespeak of innovation and progress, push society ever
| closer to a precipice where freedom is the currency, and
| autonomy a relic of the past. They peddle visions of a
| technocratic utopia, all the while drawing the noose of
| control tighter around the neck of democracy, commodifying
| our digital souls in the altar of the algorithm.
|
| The moral is clear: in the shadow of giants, the quest for
| power blurs the line between benefactor and tyrant. As Google
| and Microsoft carve their names into the annals of history,
| the question remains - will society awaken from its digital
| stupor, or will we remain pawns in their grand game, a
| footnote in the epic saga of the corporate conquest of the
| digital frontier?
| tcoff91 wrote:
| Your writing is riveting. I enjoyed this comment very much.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| The escape path is to demote Github to merely an "officially
| supported mirror" of your project, with Issues and PRs
| elsewhere, but ...
|
| The tar-pit I'm afraid of: How do you emigrate Github PR and
| Issue databases in some format that any of self-hosted
| Forgejo, or public Codeberg, Gitlab et al understand and can
| present to visitors?
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I understand why companies do this but I sure don't like
| it. They often use Discourse, which I find to be a lot less
| readable than GitHub (the design follows what I call
| "duploification" -- the elements are all large and
| surrounded by too much whitespace!)
|
| On top of that it's yet another site I have to sign up with
| if I want to interact with the community.
|
| I'm also mindful of the risks of centralization. Discord
| and its lack of external archives is a prime example of how
| that can be harmful. I'm just not sure if that risk
| outweighs the costs and annoyances.
| asveikau wrote:
| I recall that sourceforge gave you an SVN repo and an issue
| tracker, so it was kind of a hub for running your project. What
| made GitHub stand out was easy forking, and the pull request
| code review UI, and slick source history UI. A lot of this was
| aided by the technical innovation of using git and making git
| such a central piece.
| ashleighz wrote:
| Yup, this was it for me, GitHub was actually pleasant to use,
| to browse, PRs were easy, branching was easy, PRs with
| reviews/comments/etc were a brand new concept, especially as
| SourceForge and Google Code were hosted only on SVN which
| constantly fucked up/corrupted data in my experience
|
| The closest thing to PRs that I knew was reviewboard, and
| that was a bolt on to SVN, not an actual proper integration
| 127 wrote:
| Decentralized version control systems were popular before
| Github and even Git. Github didn't create a market, it captured
| it.
| markphip wrote:
| The market GitHub created was Social Coding and the idea that
| there were network effects to be gained by having all OSS in
| one place. This is the same thing that makes it difficult
| today for OSS projects to move off GitHub. If anything,
| GitHub deemphasized the "D" in DVCS.
|
| My point, since you replied to my post, was simply that prior
| to GitHub, none of the other sites for OSS were trying to
| achieve the same goal. The goal was to establish a specific
| OSS community for a set of projects. SourceForge was a bit of
| an outlier in that a lot of projects used their distribution
| network, if they were not part of a foundation like Apache or
| Eclipse that had extensive mirrors setup.
|
| SourceForge was never the main development and collaboration
| site for any of the major efforts happening around OSS.
| pimlottc wrote:
| I think this is a good point, and also part of the larger trend
| of Internet activity moving to centralized providers. Users are
| now habituated to look for an existing platform to host their
| content, whether that's video (YouTube/Tiktok), blog posts
| (Medium/Substack), hot takes (X/Threads) or code (Github). It
| doesn't even occur to most people that there's another way to
| do it. They see these companies as just part of the public
| infrastructure of the Internet.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Because it's so damn easy. I started contributing to OSS and
| creating repos on GitHub when I was 16. I was not able (or
| interested in) managing my own git server; I didn't have any
| connections to Apache.org. Sure I could've emailed diffs to
| some mailing list, as I know many people have done for years,
| but GH is a vastly better experience.
|
| Github was so accessible that it made possible what otherwise
| would not have been.
| hyperhopper wrote:
| > Obviously the rise of git played a big role in this.
|
| I would argue it's the other way around. Mercurial is a better
| source control system, and was a close contender with git back
| then. However, GitHub winning the hosting war and also being
| all in on git is what cemented git as the leader. Bitbucket was
| hosting both and with a more generous free plan, but they
| didn't win the social and UX fight so git became the de facto
| standard since that's what you used on the cool good new
| platform.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I felt like the kernel using git gave it a lot of
| credibility. I can't recall any big projects using Mercurial.
| Trust is especially important for a version control system.
| akira2501 wrote:
| I think you're overselling it a little bit. At the time the
| community wasn't as large and it was much easier to "host your
| own" OSS site and distribute your software directly. There were
| plenty of important projects that served themselves in this way
| and didn't rely on a giant corporation's largess to be
| "hosted."
|
| Also.. aggregators like freshmeat.net used to exist and did a
| huge amount of work patching these disparate communities and
| individual sites together into a single cohesive display of
| "open source."
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| It's so frustrating how code hosting is like 10 years behind the
| big tech companies' internal tooling. Like GitHub is still
| terrible for stacked PRs, monorepos, code search, refactoring,
| etc. We're just starting to catch up with tools like Graphite,
| but in all honesty, Graphite should be a feature that GitHub made
| 10 years ago. I appreciate it being built now, but I question why
| it took this long.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Meanwhile in non-big tech our company migrated from SVN to git
| last year...
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Sourceforge still looks like a scam website. I can't really put
| my finger on it, but even if a project is "officially" hosted on
| sourceforge to me it looks like a random guy's Mediafire download
| link
| myself248 wrote:
| I think it acquired that icky film around the time it started
| bundling malware with official downloads, there's another
| comment going more into that.
|
| But prior to that, I don't remember it feeling scammy at all,
| it was just the place to go for software. After that, the very
| same look and feel had been tainted, and now felt like a trap.
| Still does.
| Avamander wrote:
| It's probably the colors and button designs that really
| resemble the design of Mediafire and other download sites that
| are used for suspicious purposes?
| licebmi__at__ wrote:
| Also the "please wait x seconds before download" while they
| advertise some other stuff.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| There just wasn't an appreciation for version control - and a lot
| of practices - at most companies until the mid to late 2000s. And
| I remember a lot of dev effort was spent dealing with internal
| SVN servers sitting in a closet. And other infra to do nightly
| builds etc.
|
| Management and IT didn't understand why they would want these
| things. Very few companies internalized these practices and
| usually learned the hard way to adopt them.
|
| So back then these were somewhat new and radical ideas. But along
| comes GitHub, focusing on massive ease of use, and outsource an
| annoying hassle of most dev teams.
|
| At the same time it was becoming more common to use open source
| libraries at work. But only sporadically and cautiously. I
| remember the work to get Boost (C++ lib) approved by legal. And
| that's an extremely mainstream library. Often you would have to
| purchase or just write a lot of foundational code yourself.
|
| So making a hosting solution with all these bells and whistles,
| but easy to learn, while also making it possible to discover code
| was fundamentally life altering for software engineering.
| csmattryder wrote:
| A testament to how few of us used Microsoft's CodePlex that
| nobody really remembers it, and wasn't mentioned in the article.
|
| It had docs, issues and source code sections back then, but I
| can't remember if some of those features were spurred on by
| GitHub adding them first.
| aduffy wrote:
| I remember using GitHub as a teenager, circa 2010. I, not
| understanding git because I was an idiot, accidentally force
| pushed and deleted my history.
|
| I emailed the support email explaining the situation, and within
| a few hours got a reply from Chris saying that he'd fixed my
| repo, along with some advice about how to avoid this issue in the
| future.
| psanford wrote:
| It was always my opinion that Github's killer feature was putting
| repositories under user namespaces. Its hard to imagine but
| before Github you had to ask SourceForge politely if you could
| have a given project name. Just the ability to make your own
| projects without needing to ask anyone seems so obvious now, but
| really was a game changer at the time. This is also then deeply
| tied to the idea that forking repositories should be easy.
|
| I'm glad to see that the article includes this in their history.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| exactly. IMO it's the per-user structure that won over the per-
| project one. guthub and bitbucket won over srcforge, ggl.code
| and launchpad etc of the project-only side.
|
| And as bonus, it well matched the timing of social-networking
| rising..
|
| (Apart of srcforge doing shit itself..)
| rogerbinns wrote:
| One big mistake SourceForge made was not scoping repositories.
| There could only be one project of a name on the entire site,
| which is why there was manual review. People naturally wanted to
| participate at the one true project, not a differently named
| fork. This introduced the usual social issues of being the
| "official" project, who had and controlled commit access, etc.
|
| Github smartly made it user/project so the same project name can
| exist any number of times, and it is only the top level
| user/organisation that needs to be reviewed.
| eslaught wrote:
| I believe I got my original GitHub invite from another HN user,
| back in the days when it was still invite-only. I confess at the
| time I didn't really "get it", despite having played with Darcs
| and the like prior to this.
|
| But (in retrospect), I don't think it's really that complicated.
| SourceForge, back in the day, had a really atrocious UI. As a
| highschooler navigating CVS and SVN repos for the first time, it
| was really difficult to figure out how to even download source
| code (this was especially horrific with CVS on Windows), let
| alone contribute in any meaningful way. Discussion on these sites
| required you to sign up for a mailing list. I think Gmail was
| just barely a thing, but prior to that as a student I would have
| been stuck with some awful Hotmail account or similar. Anyway,
| the hurdles were high and therefore this selected for "serious"
| contributions (or people willing to put up with a lot of
| obstacles). SourceForge may have supported some sort of bug
| tracker, but I don't remember ever interacting with a project
| that used it, so in practice people were splitting their various
| components (code, mailing lists, bug tracker) between several
| different sites.
|
| Ignore Git for a minute. GitHub, if nothing else, had a really
| slick UI. That UI put code front and center, so it was (finally!)
| obvious what sort of project you were actually looking at. I
| think it can't be underestimated how much this uniformity makes
| code easier to browse, as compared to the vast gulf in difference
| in quality between the best and worse homepages of open source
| projects prior to this.
|
| For fun, here's one that I authored back in the day. The home
| page here is actually kind of informative, but you can see how if
| this is all you get, the results are going to be all over the
| place:
|
| https://ip-interfaces.common-lisp.dev/
|
| Beyond this, GitHub offered a permissionless collaboration. In
| the bad old days of open source, I could clone a repository, and
| I could write patches, but the cost of setting up forks was
| prohibitive. This is one of the things I didn't "get" at the
| time, but GitHub made it practically (and socially) acceptable to
| just fork whatever you needed, change something, and submit it.
| Or not, it didn't matter. Whether you intended for your
| experiments to be useful to anyone else or not, it dramatically
| lowered the cost of starting and maintaining those experiments.
| And that I think dramatically changed the face of open source
| software (for the better).
| zzzeek wrote:
| sourceforge was like a big klunky 8-track tape player of open
| source hosting. it was awful, and it's all there was. literally
| anything that people put up and managed to publicize a bit would
| have replaced it.
|
| a more interesting question is why did Github win out over
| Bitbucket (I know the answer to this also, it begins with
| Mercurial and ends with "Atlassian buys them", but in the middle
| it gets into interesting questions about source control systems,
| issue trackers, etc).
| ompogUe wrote:
| SourceForge, Slashdot and Freshmeat all seemed to go downhill
| hand-in-hand to me. Bought and monetized and sold and bought and
| sold and monetized.
| sgbeal wrote:
| FWIW... i was an early adopter of SourceForge and absolutely
| loved it for the first few years. It was a godsend at the time.
| At some point (2004? 2006?) its web interface became so ad-ridden
| that it was effectively unusable, and that was what drove me away
| from SourceForge.
| samtho wrote:
| There a small bit of irony that it required a fully decentralized
| source control management in order to consolidate the market for
| OSS code/project hosting. The obvious caveat is that git allows
| any project to pack up and leave anytime they want, but the
| vendor lock-in came by means of the network effect and developer
| preference. There is an incentive on GitHub, at least, to provide
| a superior product to other alternatives like Gitlab or
| Bitbucket. Ultimately, it meant the risk of choosing GitHub was
| very low due to the nonexistent vendor lock-in.
|
| During SourceForge's decline, most OSS projects were either very
| prolific, general purpose libraries or full software packages,
| all of which had most of their infrastructure sorted. There were
| a number of other platforms, now mostly forgotten, that tried to
| acquire the displaced market shed from SF's former userbase.
| Almost every one of the new platforms wanted to just be a better
| SourceForge, but none of them wanted (or thought to) to tackle
| the problem of git hosting as their primary product they were
| selling to users - which ultimately proved to be what the market
| wanted. OSS devs with a project likely already had an issue
| tracker, website, discussion forums, etc, and they didn't want to
| spend their day in a CRUD app manually managing releases and
| fielding support requests on a platform that different from what
| they setup already. GitHub offered public git repository hosting
| with a modern look that was betting on companies buying
| commercial-oriented features as a monetization strategy, rather
| than ads. Eventually, a-la-carte features such as issues,
| discussions, and wiki were added, but were able to be toggled at
| the project-level.
|
| Meanwhile, SourceForge was too busy cramming more ads in,
| cluttering layout, trying out asinine social media integrations,
| and ultimately, accelerating their (at this point) well-deserved)
| death by packaging malware/adware in software distributions. It
| was easy to see in the moment (and even more in hindsight) how
| much of a loser strategy this was for SF. It's _almost_ comical
| how spectacularly they fucked up their own market share with
| short-term thinking and outright stupid ideas. Not much love was
| lost here by the end.
|
| Without GitHub, npm would not have been successful (which itself
| inspired other package managers), CI/CD would either be a bigger
| mess or dominated by a single vendor (which enabled fun stuff
| like infrastructure-as-code), coding in general would not be as
| accessible, and git itself may not have won out as heavily as it
| did.
|
| GitHub's success is a good case study in a startup being at
| exactly the right place at the right time, with the right
| product. The result wasn't the mass migration of prolific
| projects immediately moving in, rather it enabled this back-
| pressure of micro-OSS projects to thrive because now it became
| viable to build a library that does one thing really well without
| the admin work of managing a full-blown OSS project. A number of
| projects eventually moved in, but the driving force to adoption,
| in my opinion, were the tiniest projects that ultimately proved
| this platforms viability.
| saurik wrote:
| > The obvious caveat is that git allows any project to pack up
| and leave anytime they want...
|
| People always say this but it just isn't even remotely true.
| Even if we ignore the "obvious" issue of, well, issues and
| other important project data that isn't part of your git
| repository, if you try to "pack up and leave" you will rapidly
| find that your github.com URL is now distributed around the
| entire internet as if it were your home page and is even
| embedded into other peoples' build scripts as the core problem
| was never the data you are hosting but is actually the identity
| and address of that data. The reality is that GitHub using git
| is no different from any other hosting platform, such as
| Instagram or YouTube. Yes: your content on YouTube is "merely"
| a bunch of video files and those video files could just as
| easily be hosted on any other video hosting provider as video
| files are about as boring and standardized and _portable_ as
| can be imagined, yet obviously we wouldn 't say anyone can
| trivially "pack up and leave" their decade of investment into a
| popular YouTube channel.
| kijin wrote:
| The article does a good job explaining why GitHub won the
| developer mindshare, but there was also end user mindshare.
|
| Unlike GitHub, where the source code is front and center,
| SourceForge always prioritized showing a project introduction
| page with screenshots and a big download button for the end user.
| SourceForge is where non-developers went to download cool
| freeware. It was like F-Droid for Windows. It was meant to be the
| official website for the projects it hosted, which is why it
| didn't host forks.
|
| But the market for end users who download executables from random
| websites has been shrinking rapidly for two decades. Nowadays,
| either you're a developer and care about the source code, or
| you're an end user and just want to install that app from your
| favorite app store. Not to mention that most active open-source
| projects these days are made for other developers and not end
| users, so there's no point hosting them on a platform designed
| for end users.
| adulau wrote:
| I recall Gitorious, which isn't mentioned in this article. It was
| acquired by GitLab, which subsequently discontinued it in 2015.
| The standout feature has always been the social aspect and the
| ability to attract a large user base to a git forge. If platforms
| like Codeberg or similar forges enhance their social integration
| and capabilities, they could eventually become strong competitors
| to GitHub.
| sidcool wrote:
| SourceForge fell to its greedy overlords and started shipping
| malware.
| nottorp wrote:
| Sourceforge entshitified before the term was in fashion.
|
| Let's not forget git came up. It may have a lot of sins but it's
| better for distributed work. Utility libs and software switched
| to git, other devs got used to it and started to use it
| themselves...
|
| Then a few git hosting solutions showed up. That not only allowed
| hosting public projects but you could also host your private
| commercial (or just private) projects on them. Either free or for
| pay.
|
| Then github offered unlimited private repos with unlimited users
| for like $9/month. That was before the MS acquisition.
|
| End of story...
| Asmod4n wrote:
| SourceForge also had the annoying UX where you couldn't just
| create or upload a repo, they had to allow it to be uploaded.
|
| GitHub not having anything like that made it way more useful.
| chx wrote:
| Isn't it ironic how the article mentions
|
| > Git was custom-built for distributed democratized development
|
| and doesn't mention how github and gitlab too severely lacks in
| this aspect?
|
| Drupal, like a decade before git already, allowed multiple people
| to work on the same issue. This was reviewed by the community and
| then the committers and then it got merged. You _still_ can 't do
| this on Github and only through some drupal.org magic does it
| work on the Gitlab instance the Drupal Association has.
|
| Some democracy.
| mandeepj wrote:
| SourceForge stagnanted and UI was messy
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Sourceforge was built around projects with people, github was
| built around people with projects. That's my general take on it.
|
| A byproduct was the naming/addressing of projects was built
| around a person (or company), then the project - usera/project1.
| Anyone else could take/fork their own project1 - userb/project1,
| userc/project1, etc. Interested in project1? You could look at
| various versions/forks of it through the perspective of different
| users, because the user was first, not the project.
|
| EDIT: further... github really put the control back to
| individuals. anyone could start anything, vs trying to get ideas
| committed in to a project. Some of this is the nature of
| distributed vs centralized, but github still made it convenient
| to just get ideas out there. Setting up a repo takes a few
| seconds - my memory was sourceforge took a lot longer - wasn't
| there some review process where you'd submit your project then it
| was approved for your use?
| pentagrama wrote:
| Designer here, upon reading this, I found myself intrigued by Git
| [1]; it sounds awesome!
|
| Do you know if there is a free and open-source software version
| control like Git but for UI? I know in Figma there is version
| control, even branches. But I'm thinking about something not
| proprietary and not attached to a tool.
|
| And a more fundamental question, knowing Git, do you think that a
| version control for UI it is possible like what Git does for
| code?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git
| j45 wrote:
| SourceForge was never that good. It was the default. Then it went
| through some questionable changes. Similar to ExpertsExchange...
| being uprooted by Stack Overflow when they started to try and
| monetize their database in a less than popular way.
|
| Github also came out around the time Git was maturing just
| enough, and subversion wasn't really pushing into collaborative
| features.
|
| Now we see tools like Gitlab starting to get the abilty to
| customize and integrate with other things.
| jdorfman wrote:
| I remember signing up for GitHub and having to provide my public
| SSH key before creating an account which I did. I can't imagine
| how many abandoned signups there were. I think Chris tweeted
| about it.
| RadixDLT wrote:
| SourceForge was badly designed and was of no interest to the
| average developer
| anymouse123456 wrote:
| They mention requiring human approval for a new repo on Source
| forge, but that was just a symptom of the fact that projects
| names came from a global namespace. It's hard to overstate how
| challenging this was. Some little exploration required this
| globally unique name and huge burden to come up with one. That
| was all before even applying.
|
| One of the truly genius moves that Github made, was to put
| projects behind each account namespace. It's my view that this is
| one of the core things that made GitHub so attractive to people.
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| I saw gitorious being mentioned in the comments and want to
| second that. The article missing that gitorious was the sleeker
| looking and most promising second contender after github until it
| was aquired and shutdown by gitlab seems odd. It still baffles me
| that gitlab never managed to make their product look or feel even
| half decent. Whoever will challenge github will look and feel
| more human and more like home not less.
| codexb wrote:
| IMO, the Gitlab interface is better than github for most of the
| actual code features. Github still doesn't have a graphical
| tree view of the commit history. Hell, even the git CLI has
| that.
|
| The only thing I like better about Github is the dashboard for
| managing MR's/issues/notifications. Gitlab still hasn't managed
| to figure that out. Gitlab CI was also miles ahead of Github CI
| for a long time. Github is better now, but CI is one of the few
| things that really locks you into a vendor. Plus, Gitlab had
| much better enterprise pricing options for a long time. I'm not
| sure what it's like now. I don't have any numbers, but I
| suspect that Gitlab has more market share when it comes to
| locally hosted deployments.
| ipunchghosts wrote:
| Source Forge failed when it started bundling mallard with binary
| downloads. Case closed!
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