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Comment by avolcano | Hacker News Reader

SourceForge still has a niche that's significantly different from GitHub or Google Code: it's made to be somewhat friendly to end-users of large open source apps. Honestly, I'm surprised they haven't fully pivoted to being an open source "app store" (with more community features i.e. forums and support).

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Yup. Especially after github abandoned the download feature which allowed developers to provide compiled binaries.

Github is great, but to end users which are just searching for good open source software to use its practically useless.

I hope sourceforge regains some of its old strength. I remember that when I was looking for open source software I googled something like "cd ripper sourceforge" and I would almost always find the current de facto standard open source solution to my problem. Without scanning through miles of useless entries filled with cdnet and the like.

I wish Github would bring back the download binaries feature, at least provide it as a Pay option to pay for the bandwidth.

If SourceForge is friendly to anyone, it isn't end users.

There is a lot they could do.

Thus the "somewhat." Still, I've downloaded everything from torrent clients to open source video games from SourceForge, and many of those projects have (or, much more likely, had) active support forums on SF. It's a shame that they haven't pursued that route further and instead are just going after the Github/Bitbucket/etc market.

It's a lot better than github, IMO. Still not as good as a real project page with binaries, or ideally just having your package in macports, mac app store, ubuntu/debian repositories, etc.

I dunno. I would rather have a page with binaries plus macports, etc. There are a lot of cases where you may want to reach out to markets not covered by external repos or where you haven't gotten into every external repo you want to.

Yes, you should have both. Plus ideally presence on GitHub and Sourceforge. (I also would never use a service as my only repo...)

(We got into Debian/Ubuntu repos not too long ago but there are still many more to get into.)

This app store idea also made me think that they need to show big screenshots of the apps immediately, and allow developers to put videos in there, too.

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