[0]: https://neverworkintheory.org/2022/04/21/decline-of-sourcefo...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31110206
As my memory recalls it, that triggered an exodus to Google Code, and whilst GH was gaining traction it was somewhat in their shadow. When Google announced they were going to kill Code that was the blessing for GH.
This was a mortal sin for them, and rightfully so, whereby it became impossible to recover the damage to their reputation. Like, what were they thinking? Did they know they were doomed and just wanted one final ad sale? It’s just an egregious abuse of whatever dwindling power they had which permanently destroyed what little trust that the developers had for them - the same group of people that provided the only real value (for free, even) that SourceForge held.
They'd been recently bought by a shitty company called DICE that also owned ummm... CNet or Download.com, or some other similar place with lots of downloads for Windows users:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice.com
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Adware_controversy
That company already served ~malware~ sorry "bundled third party offers" with their windows downloads, and figured they'd be able to copy-n-paste that approach to popular OSS downloads.
That's not how it played out however, as some of us actually give a shit about things like that. ;)
/. is a faint shadow of what they once were.
TBF, it wasn't just Dice. At that time, CNN and Yahoo (I think) nuked their trollgard- er, comments, and they all went to slashdot. It became the place to go, for top-quality Nazi ASCII art.
Enter the DevShare program, a Faustian bargain if there ever was one. It whispered sweet nothings into the ears of developers, promising them a slice of the pie if they let these third-party gremlins hitch a ride with their creations. But here’s the twist – SourceForge, in a move that would make Machiavelli blush, didn’t always wait for a nod of approval. They shadow-copied projects, dolled them up with their unwanted baggage, and pushed them onto the unsuspecting masses as the real deal.
Who masterminded this descent into madness? The suits at SourceForge under the banner of Dice Holdings, who else? Names weren’t named, but the open-source warriors and keyboard knights didn’t need a who to channel their fury at the sacrilege committed against their digital Eden.
But as the adage goes, "It's always darkest before the dawn," and so it was for SourceForge. By 2016, under the new flag of BIZX, LLC, a wind of change blew through its realm. The DevShare program, that deal with the devil, was slain, laid to rest in the hopes of resurrecting the platform's lost glory. The new overlords vowed a return to the old ways, a purge of the parasitic practices, aiming to restore faith in the digital congregation and bring back the prodigal programmers.
SourceForge’s saga is a testament to the eternal battle for the soul of the internet, a reminder that even in the digital age, the pen (or the code) is mightier than the sword (or the adware).
Over time, the nuances of the word "prodigal" have expanded, and it can now be used in a variety of contexts to describe any sort of excessive or wasteful behavior, not just financial. Additionally, it can sometimes be used in a positive light, emphasizing generosity and abundance rather than waste.
So if their calculation was that all of open source would stay on their platform with them adding malware, they were wrong. But if the calculation was that a long tail of random small and semi-orphaned projects would stay there after the big popular projects had all migrated, providing them with essentially free revenue for a very long time, they were kind of right.
When MS also announced they were closing that and offering a tool to migrate to GitHub, was when GitHub (and Git) truly became the biggest remaining option.
The other aspect of SourceForge's decline was that they doubled down on the sketchy site feeling right as acceptance of such sites was on the decline, the likes of mediafire, zippyshare etc were being replaced with cloud storage providers and download aggregators were losing popularity (in part due to also becoming very sketchy and prone to pushing malware). They might've been able to get away with it a few years earlier. I remember that back then it wasn't a huge deal to follow a mediafire download link from somewhere that seemed reliable enough, whereas nowadays it'd be an immediate red flag due to the abundance of more legitimate seeming file sharing options.
Google was already using GitHub ("To meet developers where they are, we ourselves migrated nearly a thousand of our own open source projects from Google Code to GitHub.") and added an "export to GiHub" button on google code. Maybe if you were .net you went to codeplex but most everyone else (including Google) went to GitHub, if they weren't already there.
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2015/03/farewell-to-google...
That happened in 2015. Everyone was already on GitHub by then. GitHub had surpassed in usage Sourceforge, Code, and CodePlex from 2011. Also CodePlex didn't had Git support until 2012.
The only real question at the time was whether Git or Mercurial (or for a brief period of time Bazaar if I remember correctly). While Mercurial itself was clearly superior to Git, it had no equivalent to GitHub.
If GitHub had chosen to build their workflows on Mercurial instead we would likely be talking about HgHub right now instead.
There existed BitBucket (it still exists, but as far as I am aware they switched to offering Git hosting).
Also the main advantage of git was local copies, so the source code was more safe. And speed SVN was slow for large repos. At my first place we had an SVN server in the server room, when it's hard drive crashed no one could work for a day :)
Still people hated git first because it was much more complicated with it's branches, PRs etc
Bundling adware with software was not the death knell for Sourceforge, it was a death rattle - though the corpse is livelier than I’d have thought ten-plus years later.
It's just one of the examples where somebody came along offering pretty much the same thing but just with a different focus (code/collab), and arguably also relevant a cleaner, fresher look.
My dad runs his company accounting on GnuCash, and I sometimes help him set up a computer, and it is always startling that SourceForge even exists. (It's still the official download[1].)
[1]: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/
P.S. I think you meant "death knell" but it's all good, we all understood. :)
Death rattle refers to a rattling noise produced in the lungs with one's dying breaths.
Both applicable, death rattle is a little bit more appropriate though, because it's an action that sourceforge took.
You are correct, I garbled it with "[death] bell toll" (specifically thinking of "for whom the bell tolls.")
Later, one day someone said in a group of Linux developers, "So, Linus made a version control system...", kinda amused. I didn't know whether Torvalds was actually going to use it for Linux, and didn't even consider that it might be adopted by pretty much all software developers of any kind.
It was even named "git", like it was aggressively trying to be unmarketable.
But at some point, GitHub emerged, and grew a very favorable reputation. Then they sold out.
Ah, finally someone recollects the original.
People look at me funny when I tell them it wasn't an Microsoft creation.
Kind of preferred Google Code over GitHub for a while. Or at least until it had enough functionality and/or tools to support it.
Almost feels like it's time again for a shift...but it will probably be a while
That might help a little with the transition, ready for when MS does one of their crazy moves and people suddenly want to switch.
In reality, I think there was (and still is, albeit small) market for alternative hosting, and there definitely were niches where SourceForge was better at (downloading binaries, for example). If SourceForge didn't misplay their hand, it's entirely possible Github won't have the near monopoly on open source hosting they have now.
(Well, lots of people still are, but Git usage grew quite fast)
The company, and Sourceforge's leadership, lost all tethering to the community that fostered them, and the firm got passed around from buyer to buyer like a blunt at a Phish concert.
At the time, GH was pretty much the best expression of hosted Git out there.