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Comment by travisgriggs | Hacker News Reader

Anyone here old enough to remember when SourceForge was The Place(tm) to stick OSS code and then how it fell from grace?

I’m curious in what ways the MicroSoft take over of GitHub is and is not starting to feel like that.

For me, one is just the difference in scale. GitHub is vast in both content as well as tooling compared to SourceForge at it’s highest points. And a commercial entity orders of magnitude smaller than MicroSoft took over SF. The rate of descent into Not Good(tm) territory also seems slower and more ponderous.

But while the magnitudes differ, the vectors look similar. Not exactly the same, because history rhymes with itself before it repeats itself.

Curious what other similarities and dissimilarities other old timers see.

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I remember when I first released the WiX Toolset publicly to SourceForge. I was up all night getting CVS prepped and writing my blog entry to announce it.

But this issue now really isn't about the source control hosting provider. It isn't even about Microsoft. It's about my relationship with the .NET Foundation who (now) holds the copyright of the project I released on SourceForge over 17 years ago.

GitHub actually had the tools I needed to move the project back. Not much more I could have asked for, honestly.

Would you ask for the copyright back? As in, it doesn't seem like they're helping you at all, so maybe you could tell them you're leaving and you would like to have the copyright back.

It might force them to show their colors, and if anything turn the brouhaha into something more clear cut.

My case is a little special because I developed the WiX Toolset when I was an employee at Microsoft. I never owned the copyright (Microsoft did). So, I wouldn't be asking for the copyright back... I'd be asking for it for the first time.

And there are advantages to a legally well protected entity holding the copyright. One for example: my company (FireGiant) is "firewalled" from certain legal issues.

So I'm still contemplating the future and don't have a real answer for you yet.

Interesting. From that description, it kind of sounds like you're both wanting your cake, and to eat it too?

Not sure what I'd do in your situation though. It sounds like you've put a shed load of time into improving "their" product, and don't really have much recourse if they don't want to play nice. :/

Though if you do fork it, it sounds like most of the non-MS employees would switch across to your fork?

But you wrote a lot of code for the project since you left Microsoft, I would think? That code should be yours.

Sure but I'm most interested in the project as a whole. And:

> And there are advantages to a legally well protected entity holding the copyright.

I honestly see this specific bruhaha as more of a DNF issue and less of a github issue. Even though both are affiliated with Microsoft, I dont think this is the same as SourceForge’s fall from grace.

I can imagine copilot being another point in the not-so-good direction, but is there anything else you are thinking of when comparing Githubs trajectory to SourceForges?

> is there anything else you are thinking of when comparing Githubs trajectory to SourceForges?

Popups, notifications, etc

Hostile ui in general

You must be joking?

I'm curious about this. I've used sourceforge for nearly two decades, but I was skeptical of it well before the controversial takeover. There are certain UI elements that sourceforge used and uses that I always relate with early 2000s click-the-monkey style ads and malware. I still trust certain button styles more than others. I still trust certain website themes more than others. Well before GitHub was the juggernaut of open source it was, I felt like I had some instinct of legitimacy compared to sourceforge or self-hosted subversion or tortoisesvn.

I think this is an important classification. When I, and I assume many of the people here, see an email to them or a friend that looks legitimate, we check the sender's full email (as opposed to the shorthand displayed, which is meaningless), and often don't click on any links, opting to physically type a url into our browser and navigate to where we should instead. There's some feeling that something is funny, in the same way some people don't buy thousands of dollars of cheap makeup from Avon and others do.

I still trust GitHub and am a happy customer. I don't think they're going the way of the buffalo. I definitely can see how (again, not an opinion I hold), one could perceive UI/UX changes that they don't like as a sign of imminent downfall.

The understanding of natural instincts in relation to simpler interactions have some reasonable explanations, albeit not universally agreed upon. How dare we have the audacity to claim an understanding of human instincts when it comes to the youngest universal man-made change to our species possibly ever?

Weird rant. Nothing against anyone.

It's not to pick on you, but why do people spell it with a capital S? I've seen it in several comments over the years. But their spelling and logo, at least going back to the 80'es, have been "Microsoft". I think they might have been "Micro-Soft" for the first year, but that was 45 years ago.

MicroProse, on the other hand, went with the capital P.

I actually do write Microsoft usually. I’m not sure what came over me. I was a tired when I wrote the original? Maybe typing out GitHub and SourceForge triggered a StudlyCaps LoveFest in my brain. Thanks for the correction.

I've found that there's a cool git repo place called "Source Hut" - which takes the "hacker" and "open source" ethos. they've got some git and some other tools that github doesn't have, and are looking pretty interesting.

https://sourcehut.org/

Yeah, I'm really pleased with sourcehut. Not many other forges let you ssh into a failed CI host to debug what's happened.

It's pretty easy to do with github actions.

https://github.com/mxschmitt/action-tmate

Wow. Didn’t know you could do that. Very cool.

It took me a while to get this working, but once it did it is an amazing feeling.

This is literally the only feature I like in circleci.

Travis and CircleCI allow this.

Sounds pretty cool. Their native CI has an endorsement by Andrew Kelley, and while it might just be advertising based on something nice he said once, it works for me ! The ability to SSH in especially is a feature I could really use.

In any case I appreciate it doesn't try to cast itself as a free service while remaining affordable. I've got my fill of arcane, polymorphic subscription models.

Github _is_ the embrace phase. It is sad that a lot of OSS projects do not see it. MS has through Github control over OSS. As someone noted in another post they want admin access. This means that they can do what they want with your code even injecting malware. I wonder if people wanting to deprecate FTP do not have a hidden agenda. Because with https you are at the mercy of an organization.

The .NET Foundation wanting admin access to repos of projects under the .NET Foundation umbrella is very much not the same thing as how the people who run GitHub could backdoor any repo they like whenever they want, obviously they can they have the source code to the hosting platform.

Except that's pretty hard to do without developers noticing because you'd need to engineer some hash collisions to get their local git clones to accept the code changes.

So let's limit the paranoia to where it actually applies, shall we? The .NET Foundation has made a right mess of this, but it's not the same thing as Microsoft trying to backdoor all open source code on GitHub. I'm pretty sure the people there are smart enough to realise how much that would backfire.

Oh I think we’ve started the extend phase. Did you notice they put out their own GitHub specific git cli? And they removed ssh links and replaced them with links specific to their cli

At least in a couple of projects i just checked the SSH link is still there, between the HTTPS and the GitHub CLI command.

Only if you are logged in. It used to be there always.

Are you sure about that? I certainly don't recall that, and it seems like it would be a bad UX idea anyway: you can't clone a repo via SSH without having an account (and a pubkey registered), so showing the SSH string to people who aren't logged in seems counterproductive.

`gh`is great for handling pull requests and other GitHub specifics. I still use `git` for everything else, so I dunno how much it does, but it makes sense if `gh` overlaps with some `git` commands to round out the tool.

`hub` had the same functionality and could be used either standalone or integrated with git so `git hub` ran hub commands to e.g. manage a pull request.

gh is just trying to get you to stop using git itself

You've been lured by the "extend" phase.

Isn't GH's PR some awful sugar around the concept of merging a patchset?

The SSH links aren't replaced by the gh links, the gh links are just an additional option.

Or actually, they aren't replaced everywhere: the "Code" tab still has HTTPS and SSH in addition to the GitHub CLI; the "Pull Request" tab has only the CLI.

The first time they did this with the hub tool, GitHub was only a few years old and many years away from any acquisition

SourceForge? What is that. That coffin is nailed shut, buried and long forgotten. I don't care if they have new management and have changed the trust I had in that site was forever damaged by spreading adware in every download.

Really? it feels nothing like it honestly, source forge amongst other things started and ended with poor developer experience, in part they died from being outclassed.

SourceForge is (and always was) more oriented towards end users, this is why when you visit a project's page you get a big fat DOWNLOAD button at the top of the page, a user score, buttons to be notified for updates, etc, when it was last updated, followed by a summary about what the project is, what its releases are, the categories it belongs to, its license and then UI to rate the project, comments by users, etc and the main buttons are about said summary, files to download, more reviews, support, mailing lists, forums, wiki, news (some projects have more or less, depending on the configuration) and at the end access to source code repository. At the sidebar there are even related projects and places where you may find other projects in case the one you are looking at doesn't meet your requirements.

For developers obviously only a small part of that is relevant but the service is not really primarily for developers and since developers "hold the keys" it makes sense that once services that care more about developers appeared many developers moved there. From a user's perspective it is sad though since pretty much every other supposed alternative does not provide a lick of SourceForge's features and the fact that there isn't any after all these years shows -IMO- how much most FLOSS developers care about their users.

On the other hand SourceForge always had a terrible UI, especially in its earlier days and while its current incarnation is the best its ever been (aside from the oversized elements) it still often feels like a mess of elements jumbled together and while they do provide a lot of useful functionality, it is often behind very clunky interfaces.

I wish there was a real alternative though.

> From a user's perspective it is sad though since pretty much every other supposed alternative does not provide a lick of SourceForge's features and the fact that there isn't any after all these years shows -IMO- how much most FLOSS developers care about their users.

Counterpoint: the readme (or GitHub.io site) in combination with lightweight features like the star count is a good enough replacement for all of the bespoke knobs on SF. OS app stores have also become a thing since SF’s decline and they’re a better route for most non-technical users.

I have never once been lured into clicking a sleazy download button on GitHub and I recall that happening on the semi regular when I visited SF back in the day.

No it isn't really, it is just a workaround for missing functionality and a site that is designed towards a different target audience.

This is pure hyperbole. There is zero evidence GitHub is anything but an evolving source control service.

A Microsoft employee pushed the move of Python to GitHub when it wasn't MS owned. Some time later Microsoft bought GitHub.

And? Loads of projects moved to GitHub when there was no Microsoft-employee involvement because it's just a very good service. And for a good long time, nothing else out there existed which could even start to compete with it. GitLab came along somewhat later.

SourceForge still has some good products but displays advertising a lot.

If you are logged in they disable the ads, or at least the generic ads. They still have the "business software" category which is essentially ads for SaaS and commercial software, but that is its own section you have to explicitly go at.

I’d be surprised if Microsoft saw owning GitHub as a major revenue source

They certainly see it as a funnel for their other services. Bringing developers onto Azure etc.

The .NET Foundation board doesn't even all work for MS.

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