Why SourceForge Lost

The real reason why sf.net lost was much more fundamental than that. Really it was so fundamental that it was a business problem rather than a technology problem. As a company, management just wasn't that interested in competing, and therefore we didn't have the institutional ability to focus on competing with some of the things github did.

I am proud to say that it looks like sf.net finally has a fork button, though, and it also looks (from the outside) like there's some focus on delivering developer oriented features now on sf.net, so that's a positive thing.

The engineering and ops team that's over there is awesome and has great open source pedigrees, and has always been super interested in working on things that would make open source development better and easier, but really has been hampered from doing that for years by more basic business issues. I think things might finally be turning around for them, though.

Also, if I want to setup a repo and put it on GitHub, it's stupidly, ridiculously easy. SF isn't hard, but it isn't as easy.

Open source software is about PROGRAMMERS collaborating. GitHub makes that incredibly easy and straightforward. Want to join a project? Fork the code and tweak til your hearts content. Your code shows up in the network and other people can find/clone/fork/hack til their hearts are content. Want to contribute to a SF project? Um... contact the dev and hope the project isn't dead?

SF is designed to be a kind of Download.com for FOSS. For that it's fine, but GitHub is designed for developers to share code.

Also, GitHub is great because it also does private code hosting, so if I'm working on my own stuff or FOSS stuff, I can use GitHub for both. That is incredibly convenient.

For the younger members here I think it's hard to imagine just how freaking cool SourceForge was when it first came out. The idea of free, featureful project hosting was amazing. Back in the 90s, even if you had free hosting, there wasn't the selection of easy-to-install FOSS web software that we take for granted today. It's sort of like how cool Slashdot was in a world of Usenet and BBSes. Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo. It's easy to forget how impressive Web 1.0 was for its time.

GitHub by contast came out of the Web 2.0 era where we had solid CSS, solid JS/AJAX, solid web frameworks, and a lot of hard-earned knowledge of UX design, and perhaps more importantly the browser technology to support it. I think the article makes a good distinction between code hosting and project hosting, and no doubt that makes GitHub's job easier, but it's not the whole story. GitHub is the result of a holistic vision that goes from the metal up to the UI and design bits. In the early days of the web putting together a team to do something like that was well-nigh impossible. With the ubiquity of the web today, the new generation of web folks can much more easily pick up both the technical and design skills to create the kind of amazing UX experience that sets GitHub apart from SourceForge.

This is a terrible pricing model. It should, if anything, be based on per-GB of storage regardless of repositories. Otherwise it gets hideously expensive for people to, say, have many small repositories.

It just doesn't make sense that, say, the Linux kernel, and a 500 line personal Ruby project are equal units as far as Github is concerned.

Us in the tech world need to stop thinking that something needs to "win" and "lose". It has fueled way to many (idiotic) religious wars about editors, compilers, and other technologies. Solve problems. Make the world a better place. And quit trying to find "losers".

/rant

GitHub's UI really made impact on me, and the short name, the agenda from the people (I've seen couple of videos from the founders talking about not github, but GIT itself).

I still get very lost using git (p4 user at work, so svn feels closer) but with enough help from github I can see it done.

But all in all github is personal first.

Nope, I'm pretty sure that's the reason.

First of all, when I started reading the article, I genuinely expected that it would be a good analysis of why GitHub surpassed Sourceforge, but instead it read like a GitHub fanboy's rant about how much cooler GitHub is. Some of the things said about SF are simply not true, for example, one of his main points - that if you host your project on SF, your project page is your website and that's it, the only other way to have a website is to host it elsewhere. That's simply not true. SF does provide web hosting, and your domain name is not some convoluted URL, it's "yourprojectname.sourceforge.net".

The author of the article states that GitHub is a "code host". But what does that mean, is SF also not a "code host"? Does it not hold your code in a repo? Except that besides doing that, it also offers a plethora of other services. They might not be the best there are, but hey, they're here, and if you don't want to use them, don't. Want to have a forum hosted by SF? Ok, you can do that. Want to have it somewhere else? No problem, host it elsewhere. Nobody's forcing you. It seems that the author is somehow trying to turn the fact that GitHub doesn't have these features into an advantage for GitHub.

The thing is, this could have really been a good article. There are a number of reasons why devs move away from SourceForge. Unfortunately, the article makes no mention of them. SF's frequent downtime is one of those reasons. The general slowness and unresponsiveness of the site is another. There are good reasons why people are leaving SourceForge. Just not those that the author of this article mentions.

With git I don't care if GitHub goes down for a month or accidentally loses all my code or kicks me out and starts to charge for hosting. It's because they are hosting a copy of my repo and are not the sole keeper. I always have my repo with my precious source code history and it's impossible for them to take it away.

I suspect a lot of hackers are like myself and don't like giving up control where they don't have to.

That and GitHub just doesn't feel as hostile as SourceForge.

I started hosting code there using CVS in 2000 and it has certainly improved since then, but I recently pushed a branch to GitHub and there's just no comparison.

I may overestime myself a little here, but I'm pretty sure that's the main/only reason Github succeeded. Not some new pricing scheme.

SourceForge, like other sites managed by VA Linux/SF/Geeknet, has a terrible record of user friendliness. How many Slashcode-based sites are still running?

Whereas github lets you get a repo up and running with just about a single click and a 'git push', and then add on features and information as you grow. So it became the place to stick all of your one-off, throwaway, or experimental code, which got developers in the habit of using it, and it also had the room to grow if once of those things grew into a "real" project.

It seems to me the author doesn't know sf.net too well. sf.net does still quite well for hosting web pages. I don't know pidgin but I wouldn't be too surprised if the homepage is hosted at sf.net and if pidgin.im simply is an alternative address for pidgin.sf.net. They (sf.net) are notorious for their downtimes though.

Things may have changed since, but I wouldn't know because I never came back.