GitHub, Collaboration, and Haters
sourceforge.net
sourceforge.net
A lazy monopoly has a way of generating extreme hatred due to the impotent rage of the people that use it because they have no other option. SF may have drastically improved in the presence of competition, but it's no surprise that some people are still angry.
I really hope that the rise of GitHub and similar competitors provokes SourceForge to innovate again.
SF has a" monopoly" and a "chilling effect" that makes you "angry", because their completely free service was not good enough for someone?
What does Sourceforge owe anyone?
Sourceforge owes nobody anything. And we don't owe it anything either. So don't mind us if we don't help fix SF.
Github is as 'completely free' as sourceforge. Firefox is as 'completely free' as internet explorer. So yes, it does make sense to use 'completely free' and 'not good enough' in the same sentence.
I used to dread going to any project that was hosted on SourceForge, hate it like going to the dentist for something to get drilled, and while it's a bit better, it's still an awful, uncomfortable experience. When I see a project hosted on SourceForge I only click the link with a heavy sigh.
Why do I "hate" SourceForge? It's because they got complacent, and because they never changed. It was like SourceForge was more important than you and you better not forget it. How many clicks was it to do something as simple as set up a new project? How many forms and emails do you need to fill out or reply to? How annoying was the distribution model, or how ugly was a project page? All these things were important but nobody cared.
That Github was able to turn around block and report so quickly is evidence that they get it, they're listening, and they aren't afraid to hustle and do what's right. Nothing is hard on Github. It is as easy as it should be. I gladly spend money on Github every month. Sourceforge couldn't pay me to use it.
Exactly. They are, like it or not, the Internet Explorer 6 of the open source hosting world.
Opening a repo actually show useful stuff for me as a developer. The source is there together with an optionally inlined README file, rendered with popular micro markups. Then add the ease of forking and you clearly get something people really like. This style of presentation isn't of course for everybody. But GitHub chose to target developers above end-users.
GitHub could have been "SVNHub" or "hghub" for all I care, the technology is secondary in this case (but close behind).
So naturally, GitHub had to appeal for subscribers. While for SF, I always thought ads was stupid due to the educated demographic that would likely have adblock.
And those people are not the educated demographic that have adblock...
I hate having to go to a source control site where it's not immediately obvious where to get to the source, or even worse, where it takes multiple seconds for a page to load.
With Github I can flip through all the source files to see what I'm looking for without having to bring the repo down locally. The same thing is also very useful to me when I want to remember how I did something in some project but don't have all my source with me. If navigating between files was slow or cumbersome, I don't think they'd be nearly as successful.
However, sourceforge is doing this to make money. What business owner with any common sense hears customers complaining about them and tells them it's rude? If customers complain about your service, you empathize with them and find out what you can do to improve.
Whatever respect for sourceforge I had just went away. You can't just ignore customer complaints because you're open source.
Most of the people who use, and have used, SourceForge have never paid for the service. If someone hasn't paid for it, and hasn't contributed to it in any real way, I don't see how it's right for them to complain about it in an obnoxious way (angrily on twitter or reddit or whatever). Send a patch to fix the problem, submit a ticket, etc. But, spewing anger without having done anything to help just makes someone a cancer on the Open Source community. If you don't like SourceForge, don't use it. But, don't pile hate onto someone that's done good things and continues to do good things.
I absolutely understand where the SF folks are coming from. Sometimes, I feel this way, too. When you have a project with millions of users, there's going to be someone who can't help but heap hate and anger on you; it's human nature, I guess. In this case, though, it seems even worse...because folks are kicking SourceForge when they're already on the ground trying to figure out WTF to do to regain some of their old luster.
I'm pretty much certain they aren't talking about "customer complaints" here. I'm sure they don't mind that kind of thing; they've been dealing with it for over a decade. I'm pretty sure what they're talking about are the "SourceForge sucks!" type rants about how evil SourceForge is. And, on that count, they're right to be upset.
The reality of the matter is that SourceForge is a dinosaur that needs to die. They may have once been great, but they aren't anymore.
Say what you will about the trolls, but they're right. And sourceforge has no one to blame but themselves.
Not to mention that it's our right to say whatever we want on our twitter stream, regardless of if we've paid for or tried to help the object of our complaints. Sourceforge doesn't owe me anything, nor do I owe them anything.
That's not what I'm grateful to SourceForge for. I'm grateful for the terabytes of transfer they've provided my projects over the years. They've also effectively hosted mailing lists and websites that receive tremendous traffic. I have my doubts that github could handle all of those aspects of that kind of service, even now that they've grown up. I suspect they'd have a lot of the same growing pains SourceForge experienced.
The reality of the matter is that SourceForge is a dinosaur that needs to die.
Really? You have no concern at all for the thousands of projects that still rely on SourceForge infrastructure?
I don't think I'm ever going to be able to see eye to eye with you on this one.
Not to mention that it's our right to say whatever we want on our twitter stream, regardless of if we've paid for or tried to help the object of our complaints.
Yes, it's your right to say anything you want. But, bitching without doing anything positive makes you a drain on the community, rather than a help. Bitch all you want about problems; but unless you're helping solve them, I reserve the right to view you (very) negatively because of it.
I can totally relate to people who root for one technology to win and trash another, because I totally root for technologies all the time. I get really annoyed when a "bad" technology comes out with a good feature I wish the technology I was rooting for had. Which is kind of insane when I think about it. This post was a good reminder about how irrational that rooting and fanboyism is. I will have to be more mindful of that stuff, because it really makes me blind sometimes.
I would like to see more rational discourse, not only in the realm of technology, but also in politics. It is seldom a question of A is awesome and B is crap. Often the comparisons are complex, and the right choice may have some dependence on circumstance. Or in the case of politics, party A may have a good position on some issues, and a bad position on others.
People have a tendency to choose a side and fight all-out for their side as right and all others as wrong. We used to do this with race or religion, and now we're doing it with other things. However, to successfully deal with the problems in our world, we need to rise above such simplistic thinking and realize that in our big complicated world, there is often a need for multiple approaches. And even if one alternative is truly superior to another, we have to realize that the superiority might not be clear to everyone, so we need to learn patience with those who may for whatever reason make the inferior choice. We also need to have the humility to admit that there might even be something we can learn from the other side.
It's not that insane if you think about long-term consequences. For example, a killer feature in a program that uses some crappy architecture makes that program more popular, which might make the crappy architecture more popular too.
a) everyone agrees github is kicking sourceforge's ass, including the folks at sourceforge.
b) no one expects this to change, including the folks at sourceforge.
I am sure the folks at sourceforge have their hearts in the right place, but a tarnished brand is a tarnished brand. They could launch a better product than github tomorrow, but I'll always have the frustration of trying to use wget on SF in the back of my mind.
Good bye and please stop crying like a baby about the hate you are getting. You have two options: make your site as easy to use as github or continue dying. Crying publicly is none of those :) .
SourceForge was (and perhaps is) a great place for open source. I don't think it was a "lazy monopoly" or even a "monopoly" at all. There were always alternatives. Always other places one could go to host code and share code. When it was the most popular site, it was the best site. Now it is simply not the best site. I am super productive on Github, and unless something 5x better comes along I don't think I will move off of Github.
Nowadays, with so many self-promotion and socialization tools out there (and which capture so much of our attention), geekdom is as much a social phenomenon as an intellectual one.
They chose to ignore their community for the better part of a decade. And now that their ad-revenue declines they're suddenly "on our side"?
As far as I am concerned they can take their whiny blog-post and shove it.
Their mistakes benefited to all new services and competitors. If GitHub had been the first to offer this kind of service, they may have committed some of SF mistakes.
I'm guessing a significant portion of it comes from how terrible the SourceForge experience has been for a very, very long time (I don't know if it's changed, I haven't had to actually use sourceforge in a long time): insufferably slow, brain-dead logical layout of project pages, UI complexity, ...
The kind of feeling which comes from having to use a crappy tool for a long time does not go away easily.
Regardless, SF has been around for a very long time, and one could at least appreciate that they're a pioneer site in open source forge hosting. The humility in the post is pretty evident, and serves as a friendly reminder that this doesn't need to be a competition.
[1] https://twitter.com/#!/ovnicraft/status/65547304698003456
I remember daily offline CVS servers (yeah, I'm that old), unusable slow mailing lists (delays of several days per mail) and the awfully complicated and slow interface. I still can't believe how much slower it even got when SSL was activated.
And the interface is still awful, as is the one of Launchpad BTW.
Still, it was the only open source hosting back then. Many projects were hosted on university servers or even Geocities with no VCS access.
Clearly, without SF Open Source wouldn't be what it is today.
That said, please host your projects on GitHub or Bitbucket in this century. Thank you. ;)
In any case, bandwith and storage cost falls faster than executable sizes grow, so in a few years this will be a non-issue for competitors even if you assume that it is an issue at the moment.
Edit: Githubs download expierience:
https://github.com/mirrors/linux-2.6, click on downloads in upper left corner, click 3.0-rc1, downloading 115mb and my bandwidth is saturated at 2MB/s.
SF is of the same banal cabal as java.net who make the mistake that they own the community. Github assumes that they must earn their role in the community..big effing difference!