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BSDobelix

So wait, you tried to prevent SF to become a "shitty monoculture"?

First: That sounds completely not like Google

Second: Now you have GH as the "shitty monoculture" (owner is MS and erases your license for Co-pilot)

Third: >>We folded it up because we achieved the goal we sought at the time, and didn't see a reason to continue.

Yeah ok that sounds like Google, try's to enter another market just to hurt them then folds ;)

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This was 2006 Google, which did stuff semi-altruistically all the time.

At that point, SF was serving malware and stuff. It was really not a great time.

Github became a monoculture years later when others folded. Google code was shut down in 2016. Github wasn't quite a monoculture then.

I also said, back in 2014, that it might be necessary to do something like google code again in 5-10 years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8605689

10 years later, here we are i guess :)

Though i think what i said then still holds - Github is not anywhere near as bad or unreliable as SF was.

SF served "malware" in 2013 NOT 2006:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Adware_controversy

After slashdot was purchased from condenast (i think?)

They had a bad name for the download pages being ad-infested even before they bundled the malware in the installers.

(And yes, fake download buttons on a site serving binary downloads went exactly where you'd expect.)

>fake download buttons

Yes and today Ad-Sense (Google) took the Crown from being then biggest Scam AD's deploy-er.

And really i don't think that's true before they where sold, ad's sure, scam/malware stuff? I don't think so...at least i cant remember.

I mean, that's just when they did it fairly deliberately. Regardless, I think you would be hard pressed to argue SF was a great hosting environment when Google Code launched, which was the point.

>hard pressed to argue SF was a great hosting environment when Google Code launched

But SF had FTP, Websites, SVN hosting and i think even a WIKI, so you can hardly compare it with Google-Code...and hey at least they opensource'd their "forge":

https://allura.apache.org/

IDK i don't have such bad memory's about SF, even today you serve big files over SF because of GH limits.

SourceForge was originally open source, but they later closed it. GNU Savannah (https://savannah.gnu.org/) runs on a fork of the last open version of SourceForge.

>SourceForge was originally open source

True after slashdot got buy'd, they also served malware AFTER the takeover (2013), and now look at that year:

Allura graduated from incubation with the Apache Software Foundation in March >>2013

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Allura

Google-Code was in 2006 right?

I do wish there were enough incentive to have a strong commercial gerrit offering. There are some very good ideas in gerrit, and it would have strong differentiation vs github-styled offerings.

Not just because I like gerrit, but because the github monoculture is wearing on me.

For a comparison on the scale of harm from the monoculture, recall that SourceForge was bundling malware with downloads, and still has a full page of ads when you download from it.

If I recall correctly, SVN was also more popular than Git at the time, so migrating hosts was a lot more painful than now...

And then you force people to change from google code to something else just to prove a point since people then where unable to setup svn server ;)

Even today you find death links from google code repos.

SVN's model is what everyone is using. Sure you git, but almost nobody is using the distributed parts - they all sync to a central sever (github). SVN just could get user management, or merges right - those should be solvable problems but somehow were not. (I don't know enough about SVN to speculate on why they didn't)

The main reason is that SVN's model of branching/tagging is based on directories in the working directory, whereas git's model (and to a certain extent, commercial SVNs like Clearcase and Perforce) is that branching/tagging is of the entire repository and not related to the file tree structure.

This is a fundamental difference and the reason that git's model works much better when branching/merging.

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