SourceForge and Slashdot Have Been Sold | Hacker News Reader

SourceForge and Slashdot Have Been Sold

fossforce.com

174 pointsJohnTHaller90 comments

Sounds like this can only be good for SourceForge after the previous scuzziness:

> "When I say trusted – I mean trusted," he went on. "We disagree with some of the previous monetization strategies from an industry and business perspective, and have immediate plans to discontinue programs inconsistent with our being a trusted and reliable resource for the entire open source community.

I wish them luck. I'm not thrilled by the GitHub monoculture.

at least a github exodus is just a git clone away

No it's not if you want to have feature parity.

Essentially it is, though:

http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/importing/import_projects_...

This is like saying that rsync and dropbox are the same thing. A github exodus is certainly possible, and it's great that github doesn't have a ton of tight lock-in (though it has some) via proprietary crap, but it's still a lot of work to leave github.

Incidentally, have you seen the original Dropbox post on HN? The second top comment is all about how it's pointless because you can "trivially" build the same thing yourself with FTP and other assorted software.

The same could be said of gitorious.org shutting down, but for the past 8 months it's been inaccessible by the Web or via git. It's just recently returned as a read-only archive (thanks to archive.org, I believe); they claim that clone URLs should work again now, although I've not had reason to try one yet.

Keep in mind that even with announcements and long shutdowns, many projects would be lost without officially-sanctioned archiving; either because their author has moved on, or they might do all of their project interaction via git commands and never see warnings on the Web interface.

Except that every other site links to your repo on GitHub and all the Issues, pull requests, Wiki and Website are there.

Well, hosting everything with a service that is backed by a company and over which you have no control was never a good move. See how Rainer Gerhards hosts his rsyslog (http://blog.gerhards.net/2013_12_01_archive.html): one canonical repository, and GitHub as a peer. Given git's distributed nature, there can be as many clones in as many services (Gitlab, BitBucket, others) as maintainers deem sensible.

subtile source insertions- would you notice them?

There is not even a measurement tool for trust on commits right now. Nothing like- (Line / NrOfDiffrentComittersTouching)* ComitersTrustworthyness according to other Projects * NrOfSimilarUnreviewedLines

Where there is no metric, there is no trust, not even in open source.

Except that the git is the least important part of GitHub. The real value is in the community and the extra services that it provides around the git source control system.

To move away from GitHub one would have to not only clone the repository (and all of the branches, tags, etc), but also scrape off the Wiki, Issues, and contact information of contributors. Then they would need to set up an alternative with a similar security infrastructure and notify everyone relevant to its existence.

I was thinking the same thing - it would be really nice if they could return SourceForge to its former status.

I don't feel too strongly about GitHub one way or the other, but having some more options can only help.

You can't repair such a breach of trust, sourceforge is forever tainted.

Not only that but it's incredibly difficult to build up trust as a host of installers/exes from scratch.

Not just that, SF's infrastructure is incredibly obsolete.

Before the malware shenanigans started, they could have tried to relaunch with a full rewrite, keeping just the brand. Now even the brand is tainted, there is nothing left except a large database of users and SSH keys (and Slashdot, which apparently is still read by some people).

I think that's a bit harsh.. there is still a ton of software hosted only on sourceforge. And plenty of people that need the software that don't know about sourceforge's bad behavior. When I am researching random software or libraries, I find myself on an almost daily basis temporarily overriding the ublock rule for sourceforge.

Have you checked out Gitlab? It looks quite cool. https://about.gitlab.com

It doesn't look good, it's great. I mean it. They give Gitlab CE for free on their website, see what it can do: https://about.gitlab.com/features/#enterprise Only gitlab.com does more than github + integration service. Recently GL CEO wrote here on HN that if you host gitlab yourself for your opensource project you could get lifetime CE version by writing to them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924406

My experience on the two boxes I have installed GitLab CE on using the .deb packages was that it hosed apt in both cases. So, YMMV

Please email me or support@gitlab.com with this problem. I've never heard this before and we take this very seriously.

Our Omnibus packages installs all GitLab dependencies in the /opt directory. If this is not your thing it might be good to know that there are now official native Debian packages for GitLab 8.4 (still working on Jesse backport).

Our Community Edition (CE) is MIT licensed and will always be free for everyone, without asking. We discussed giving GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) licenses to open source projects. But it turned out that it is better to make the features that are essential open source completely https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10926400 So we did that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10931884 and will keep doing that.

Bitbucket is also quite affordable if you're willing to host on your own: https://www.atlassian.com/software/bitbucket/pricing?tab=hos...

Bitbucket is also quite affordable even if you're not willing to host your own.

Their pricing is different to Github. GH pricing increases with the number of private repositories needed, whereas BB prices based on team members, with unlimited private repositories.

For a small team like ours, with lots of small repositories, it's a no brainer.

Same with us, BitBucket has been absolutely great, I actually like their UI better (just a taste thing).

I find Bitbucket a lot easier to navigate as well. Some stuff in github is really unintuitive until you have used it a few times.

It's the little things that make the difference for me - like being able to restrict pushing to certain branches to either specific people or specific groups, which has saved a lot of accidents.

When you're developing an open source application, though, you need the community of Github. I'm hoping that changes in the future. Not that Github goes away, just that alternatives are equally as viable to build a community around.

Indeed, that and I like it's team -> project -> repository UI a great deal, even though I mostly work alone I can create a team for each client, multiple projects and repositories spread between them.

I've few complaints about bitbucket and when you consider it's still free for me it's insane (I've felt so bad by how much I used it I kinda wish they would charge a few bucks a month sometimes).

I have many small open source projects, so bitbucket (which has unlimited public repositories) is in theory a better fit for these: each project can gets its own repository, vs. having each project in a sub-directory of one repository in github.

Unfortunately, bitbucket lacks some features: their markdown syntax does not allow HTML and they have no views / downloads statistics. The lack of statistics means that their search feature is not so good- no way to sort by popularity.

I'm trying gitlab now: it also doesn't seem to have views/downloads stats. Also the web-site was slow a few days ago.

The lack of statistics is odd: even sourceforge has this.

Well never mind: github does allow unlimited public repositories. I don't know why I thought otherwise.

Yes, my current preference is for Bitbucket, but a large part of that is that I personally prefer Hg to Git. I still eneded up finally making a GitHub account just because so many other projects are hosted there.

That's pure PR bull that'll have no bearing in reality - and if you boil that statement down he's said nothing, committed to nothing.

True, most of what the guy said seemed pretty gauzy. But putting a stop to the bad practices was one of the few immediately actionable things he said.

Why don't you setup your own private server on Amazon or Azure or whatever? Taking SF that uses Subversion, I'd install SVN server on cloud.

Slashdot was a big part of my early years in the tech industry. It had it's own cultural quirks, but overall was a great place to get general 'news for nerds'. I still visit every so often as it gives a slightly different angle on the industry to HN. Much like lxer.com.

I for one welcome our new corporate overlords! f1rst p0st! How about a Beowulf cluster of those??

Ah, the good old days... :)

Natalie Portman, naked and petrified and covered in hot grits

All your base!

Those were some good times.

Constantly referring to 'M$FT' to be edgy. Good times.

Seriously though 2016 will be the year of the Linux desktop.

If you think about it, the year of the Linux mobile has happened already.

I guess that was the point: everyone was trying to conquer the desktop when the desktop was already giving way to a more dominant form of computing.

But hey, the Linux kernel and Konqueror basically won consumers in the end.

The Borg icon of Bill.

And the /. pony logo.

And the 9/11 live coverage on Slashdot, when every other news site was down, Slashdot was up and running: http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-tower... and http://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1842258/our-new-pearl-har...

Ah, fond memories.

BSD is dying. Netcraft confirms it.

Slashdot is also where I first saw http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt posted.

Anyone remember seeing the occasional "(Score: 5, Troll)" comment, which only happened when a comment got downvoted as "Troll" and then upvoted as "Underrated" (which didn't change the "tag")?

Anyone remember seeing the occasional "(Score: 5, Troll)" comment, which only happened when a comment got downvoted as "Troll" and then upvoted as "Underrated" (which didn't change the "tag")?

I had a few of those. I was more proud of my "(Score: -1, Insightful)" though.

Best I ever managed was a +4, Flamebait.

Having been involved in the anti-spam thing for a while, I can simplify the "spam solutions" checklist to two items:

1) Do you have a solution to one piece of the spam problem?

  ( ) Yes - go away, you don't solve the whole spam problem.
  ( ) No  - go away, you're not helping to solve the spam problem

2) Do you have a solution to the whole spam problem?

  ( ) Yes - go away, you're a FUSTTSP scammer
  ( ) No  - go away, you're not helping to solve the spam problem.

The explicit approach by the SMTP people was both of the above at the same time. Incremental solutions were derided as "the spammers will just try something else". Major fixes to SMTP were derided as "it takes a decade to deploy a new protocol".

Well, it's been a decade since I was involved. Changes to SMTP practices mean that I've got jump through more hoops to prove my worthiness when I send email. But the amount of spam I'm getting hasn't gone down.

Searching turns up zero results for "FUSTTSP" apart from your comment. Can you elaborate?

It was from memory.. it's FUSSP:

http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html

I was a reader too but really hated their pedantic attitude: difficulty for passing their filter to post a news, and the owners not modifying a post when you pointed to an inaccurate news item (e.g: claiming that a security bug was discovered by someone else).

It was a big part of my news in the past too. But I started hating the attitude and snarkiness that overtook the site. People lost the art of discussing and debating things and instead focussed on too-often repeated memes and abuse. Honestly, I fond Hacker News and never went back. I actually think I had forgotten it even existed until this post. As for SourceForge ... good riddance to that malware infested cesspit.

I used to go to SlashDot, in the same way that I come to HN now- for good tech-related news that I couldn't find anywhere else. The comments used to spawn great swaths of related research but now I might as well go to 4chan. Fortunately HN is still awesome and the comments always add to a discussion.

Me too. Slashdot's comment system was a bit more advanced. Slashdot's downwind came from Digg, Reddit and HN. Though the insightful comments switched directly from Slashdot to HN. And HN is changing too, less startup news, bubble fears, more general public audience, more corporate spam (and voting rings, sock puppets) - though it's still a very great community and I hope it remains like that for several more years. A tech news site is great because of the comments and the news selection - and the HN algorithms work usually great.

Early on they were a great site, then they let politics take over, either directly or indirect. The indirect story method happens here too, a moderately technology oriented or business oriented title but an article usually bashing one side of the political spectrum. /. screwed up because they let their bias be known and moderation was obviously affected.

Don't miss the site for it became, do miss it for what it was.

soylentnews.org has became quite good in the short time they are alive.

Loved that site until the past few years with the UI changes.

Will never forget CmdrTaco review of iPod.

> "Indeed, he promised to return SourceForge to its glory days, not only by undoing the harm that’s been done, but by bringing rapid development and much needed improvements to the site’s infrastructure."

I sure hope that means downloading projects from sourceforge can happen on a modern timescale. I have more bandwidth in my bedroom than their infrastructure.

In all fairness, you don't have to move the amount of malware through your bedroom that SourceForge moves through their network.

I haven't been on /. forever but I think a strategy focused more around gossipy/soapy topics and embracing the long tail of your (stereo)typical IT worker (tech gadgets, scify, comics etc.) would be decent. HN covers the "techy" and "startupy" segments fairly well.

I have no idea how SourceForge will turn out. In my mind it's tarnished forever due to the crapware shenanigans. They have some "community building" features that seem valuable, used to have a decent brand name and it's never bad to have an extra place for storing FLOSS.

So true for SourceForge. There are lots and lots of lesson learned items in there for folks at Github and friends. Please take note and make better!

I wish them every success. I used to use both sites extensively. I still have accounts on both (and a "coveted" 5 digit user ID on slashdot), but I rarely go there these days.

Maybe they'll turn things around.

Has any website returned to its former glory, ever?

Good question, and I'm curious to see if anyone can provide an example.

Not websites I know, but AOL instant messenger is really good these days. Gnutella is actually pretty alright. There was a brief cultural moment a few months ago in Shoreditch when some hipsters started using myspace again, but that seems to have petered out. I've heard it claimed that MetaFilter went through a bad patch and then recovered - not involved enough to know anything more about that though.

I have a sub-20k user ID. I use it to remind myself that reading stuff on the web doesn't make you rich.

Neither did owning Slashdot via VA Linux, just ask Eric Raymond about the ups (I am now ... absurdly rich). [1] and downs [2] (Nope. Didn’t sell before the bust.)

[1] http://www.linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/1999121000105NWLF

[2] http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=556#comment-228165

I imagine a sub-20k account would go for a certain amount of money.

Why so?

Mine is 64K or so, signed up six months after I had been reading the site when I owned an ISP in Hong Kong.

I still read the headlines every day but I haven't looked at a comment thread in years. I'm still quite fond of /. despite their shortcomings.

I was visiting the States when their anniversary came up and there were /. meetups set up around the country. We went to the one in San Diego and was genuinely surprised at the low quality of tech knowledge and level of conversation... bit of a let down.....

I'd sell my sub-600 user ID in an instant if there were a market.

> and a "coveted" 5 digit user ID on slashdot

Filthy casual (3 digit id!).

Seriously though, it looks like I last logged in 4 years ago. As far as I can see it's become more hysterical and niche than before, which I wouldn't have thought possible, given the long threads dedicated to e.g. defending Hans Reiser.

> and a "coveted" 5 digit user ID on slashdot

Next you're gonna tell me you also have a 5 digit ICQ number.

I've got a 5 digit slashdot id (same account name), but my ICQ number was 6 digits -- before they deleted it when I was running a bot on it :( I was pretty upset about that for a while.

Only a 6 digit ICQ number :(

The early adoption I'm really kicking myself for was shutting down a bitcoin CPU miner after calculating that the electrical cost made it a break even. It never occurred to me that the price of a bitcoin would go up with no reason behind it.

I can still remember my ICQ number for some odd reason... also 6 digits but under 500,000.

UID 161200. My account still works!

They have been sold....how many times now?

Three times.

1st) Blockstackers Intergalactic (Slashdot's original parent) sold to Andover.net. Andover.net got bought by VA Linux. VA Linux changes it's name to Geeknet. 2nd) Geeknet sells sells Slashdot and Sourceforge to Dice. 3rd)Dice sells it to these guys.

So 6 [sets of] owners.

When Andover bought VA Linux one of the assets they bought was /., so that should count as a sale.

I still wish Malda and the other guys writing the Slashcode would've realized that the future was not in blogging/advertising but in making Slashcode great. They had a good start on building something just like Drupal and a big head start but they never saw that as a business. (not like I saw it either, sadly)

As part of the nostalgia, I present my favorite Slashdot April Fool's design scheme, "OMG!!! Ponies!!!": http://i.imgur.com/7tmqgN9.jpg

I recommend http://alterslash.org/ as a "real time" best of of what's on slashdot.

The previous owner was pretty stupid. The Slashdot "Beta" was almost as catastrophic as the Digg.com fiasco. Well good that Beta vanished, good for Slashdot.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/slashd...

SourceForge could have been a wonderfull thing, especially when it comes to serving binaries from OSS. They destroyed their reputation with them bundling software will malware or hijacking projects... They could have opened their infrastructure to commercial orgs for instance, to build then deliver software ... No, they had to go the cheapest route and violate their core user's trust.

Slashdot thread: http://meta.slashdot.org/story/16/01/29/0247219/slashdot-and...

that's the old day when open source is a new things to MSFT / Apple.

Why on earth would anyone buy SourceForge? It's a money pit.

Sourceforge doesn't host binary downloads themselves. Big free mirrors like HEAnet host the files.

"Users have been contacted and reassured, both of them."

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