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Comment by aashay | Hacker News Reader

Personally I don't get why there's so much negativity. I love GitHub just as much as the next guy, but I don't see why that makes SourceForge insignificant or irrelevant. Haters gonna hate, I guess :(

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> Personally I don't get why there's so much negativity.

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.

That makes total sense to me, and I agree with the "terrible experience" part. It does look like they've made some improvements though.

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.

Would tend to agree. This new generation of repo sites for the most part has learnt a lot of lessons about how to do things. In some ways, linking to individual tweets feels a bit like bitching at people - perhaps understandable, but not really doing anything but making them seem upset.

As someone who used SF in the early 2000s, I can kind of understand the hate (but don't support it).

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. ;)

Well said (and the same to the OP). I'm a big fan of GitHub, but there's no reason to line up SF with Bin Laden and Saddam - that seems a little OTT, even if the SF interface is clunky! [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/#!/ovnicraft/status/65547304698003456

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