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Comment by user5994461 | Hacker News Reader

It's very simple: "Just use sourceforge". https://sourceforge.net/

GitHub didn't invent anything. They only made a better UI.

SourceForge was more oriented toward software users. It handles the distribution of binaries. Imagine a time when 90% of software sites would redirect you to sourceforge to download them. Distribution was first. The repo and the issue tracker were in a secondary tab.

GitHub is oriented toward developers. It shows you the repo as the main page. You can't distribute binary releases (well, it was added recently).

GitHub took over by attracting developers right at the start of the project. They need a repo, here it is. UI is nice, site works. The new projects eventually become well known and carry the reputation.

SourceForge went downhill slowly with their shady practices. Ads, confusing pages and software repackaged with adware.

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FYI my company acquired SourceForge in 2016 and have been improving significantly. No more bundled adware, eliminated deceptive ads, all projects are scanned for malware, https downloads and project web hosting, 2-factor auth & more. Big redesign coming soon too. This is a great thread, but I just wanted to let everyone know the shady practices in the OP are no more.

For those interested in more information I did an AMA here: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_...

And Ars coverage here: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/under...

Thought you'd like to know that my employer blocks sourceforge by policy but let's GitHub through though they're both code sharing platforms. You'll have to change perceptions at the corp level too.

GitHub launched in 2008. SourceForge added git support in 2009. That year delay surely contributed to GitHub taking over. Git was an absolute breath of fresh air after years of SVN (and CVS...)

First company I worked for used CVS. I worked there from 2006 - 2013. They always talked about switching to SVN, but never did.

After that all companies I worked with used Git. I never really understood was SVN added to the game...

An enormous difference (which was one of the reasons that I moved to Google Code and GitHub) was that on SourceForge one had to request a project and the SF staff had to approve the project. They would reject projects for all kinds of silly reasons.

On GitHub, you could just create a project and get going.

I switched to Google Code for the same reason. The fact that I had to ask someone before I could create a new repo was insane. It took days to get a new project up and running on SF. Google Code was a little bit nicer but they just let it fall behind the times.

Absolutely. SourceForge tried to act as gatekeepers of what was worth hosting. GitHub got out of your way. Much better approach.

I put my project (a small, windows-only WEP cracker for a very specific wireless device) on SourceForge "for free" -- it was a huge hassle to be sure, having to upload new versions with FTP and so on.

It was free and 'gatekeeperless' however.

I've learned (from this topic coming up other times) that there were times you didn't need approval for new projects on SF, but there definitely were times where you did. I don't know when, perhaps when they dropped the restrictions I had already moved on to github?

I remember being so confused by SF in its first years. Why would I want this, instead of CVS in AFS or over SSH?

The idea that most software developers wouldn't have routable workstations, wouldn't have servers they controlled---that we wouldn't keep running networked file systems over the Internet---totally not obvious. The SF people foresaw a need in a changing world and got in front of it.

When and where were you that use of AFS was normal?

Not the commenter, but guessing AFS = andrew file system.

This has been used for decades by a lot of the universities who were original internet consumers (MIT, Univ of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon, etc). In fact, it is still used by a lot of these universities and research institutions for data sharing and distributed computing, afaik.

Our department is still using it, but it is crumbling. E.g. the macOS clients are outdated. Even when there were still updates, they would come months after a new OS X release.

(It must be a lot of work for the AFS maintainers to keep everything up to date.)

I would say Google Code took over from Sourceforge before GitHub

It's very simple: "Just use sourceforge".

And Berlios!

Google Code was there for a while too. Also, self hosted systems like "Trac" for Python were popular.

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