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Comment by Lazare | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I feel that the SourceForge brand has negative value right now. For me they burnt almost all of their goodwill during their long, long period of neglect and stagnation, then went sharply negative when they started distributing malware.

I'm willing to give the new team the benefit of the doubt; let's just assume they want to create a high quality product. That's great, but I think the first step is starting over with a non-tainted brand.

It may make sense to migrate existing projects and accounts across, or even to build on top of the existing code base, just don't call it SourceForge.

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Completely agree. Sourceforge, the brand, is so tainted I can’t even read this on my phone, since a content blocker List I have installed has apparently blocked the entire domain. The brand has been shit in my own mind for a while. Not even going to bother reading this. Why does it still exist? Replaced by GitHub, Bitbucket, and Gitlab.

> Why does it still exist?

Well, we are using Sourceforge... For one particular reason - free mailing list [for our open source project]. The code is on GitHub, but we want to do things the "old way" - send a patch to the mailing list, let people review it.

-ss

There's still old source code on Sourceforge that hasn't been moved elsewhere.

Some of that is 100% stagnant, some of that is lightly maintained with a bug fix once every few years, and a little of it is somewhat actively maintained.

I always thought that Freshmeat, while not a hosting site and therefore not comparable, was an ok brand, and didn't necessarily have to go inactive, even though, yes, it couldn't keep up with everything. It could've continued to play some interesting role.

I was just thinking of Freshmeat, that was a big loss to me as I found it much easier to navigate compared to SF, at least back in the days: I rarely used SF in like 10 years and stopped completely after they added malware to archives.

Since the FileZilla fiasco I don't trust projects on Sourceforge any longer either as I cannot tell which projects are complicit in distributing malware and which use Sourceforge as an innocent software repository.

At this point would even a rebrand matter? Github has such an unspoken strong hold on the developer community that I find it hard to believe that SF will be able to make any dent at all. Github has at least been a respectable stakeholder in the whole process. No shady downloads, ads or stepping over the users in any way. The worst they did was not developing features that would have helped simplify open source development and even that was largely addressed when "Dear Github" rolled around. Even Gitlab and Bitbucket, which are far better products than SF ever was, have not been able to shake GH. Lastly, every package manager developed in the last decade has millions of its packages with repos pointing to GH. If GH shuts down open repos, npm would probably fold up overnight.

You raise some very valid arguments, but every powerful incumbent seems unstoppable right until they're stopped. The same case for why you shouldn't compete with Github now applied to, eg, MySpace. No product is eternal; someday Github will fade and be replaced, and we'll be having a discussion about how pointless to compete with their successor is instead. :)

...that being said, I don't think SourceForge is the product to supplant Github. But I think that says more about SourceForge that it does Github.

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