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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

This is a very good development, but it's difficult to see what SF could do better than Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket, they are bogged down by 15 years of technical debt and a ruined reputation.

Maybe they could retool as a Cloudflare/Akamai competitor? Their network of mirrors is probably the one thing still distinguishing them. Or they could go full-FOSS and somehow integrate with distributions, like a cross-distro Launchpad, but that's a very very very niche market. Or they could find a mobile-oriented spin (I honestly don't know anything about mobile dev).

Or, and I say this very seriously, they could find a way of getting bought by Microsoft. A lot of SF projects are legacy win32 apps that people still find essential (FileZilla etc); MS could buy them and build an appstore that actually has the stuff people want, with real developer tools and workflow powering it all. MS backing would remove the malware stigma, at the very least.

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What distinguishes SourceForge is that it has a lot of end-user features. Project owners can set up forums, a download area, a support area (distinct from the bug tracker) and more. That's probably the reason why a lot of end-user focused projects ("legacy win32 apps") keep sticking with SourceForge despite everything.

Yeah, GitHub is not a great user experience if you just want to download the installer for some program.

I still don't get why the presented url for downloading tarballs at github just use the version number, but then redirects to a more traditional filename once clicked. It gets alternative download tools like wget royally confused.

> but it's difficult to see what SF could do better than Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket

When I have a dependency problem ( usually some arbitrary version of a lib that needs to be compiled and linked ) it's much easier if the project is on Sourceforge where I can just go and read down an index to find the appropriate release, which is not necessarily the latest one, and hit 'Download' to receive a nice bz2 which will de-tar into a buildable structure.

At that point in time I don't want to fork the project, or engage socially with other developers, or pick through tags to piece-together a checkout that will link against the dependee. I just want something compilable ASAP.

Perhaps Sourceforge could find a niche there, organising the bazaar of projects on the Git* sites into something sane.

github also does versioned releases, no?

https://github.com/kennethreitz/requests/releases as an example

Two things as the author said: ease of use; distribution channel with 1+ mil visitors. The GitHub system is just really weird. Makes sense when someone knows Git and/or goes through GitHub's tutorials. Going to SourceForge, I currently see a big, green, download button to immediately get the bundled app for several OS's plus files right next to it. No odd labels tied to last commit or anything. Just the files. If project owner side is as easy, then there's a definite advantage for people that want to set up a hosting and distribution channel without lots of trouble.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_...

3rd & 4th paragraph address your comment

Yeah I read that, but it sounds a lot like "compassionate CNet-ism". A first step, but hardly the stuff of dreams.

Gotta start somewhere

FileZilla is a legacy win32 app? I understand what you mean but that's a poor example considering it runs on Linux and OSX as well and is still updated quite frequently.

> Or they could find a mobile-oriented spin

Of what?

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