Oh. I thought you were talking about a viable GitHub competitor ;)
What made it unviable except letting it languish and then shutting it down?
It had what was essentially an HTML4 UI and just SVN support for what seems like forever. I can't remember a version of it that didn't look like 2005 Gmail.
Hence "languish". When it was first made available in 2006, it wasn't an also-ran.
It was the go-to for hosting small projects for a time, back then.