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Comment by laurent123456 | Hacker News Reader

To be honest I can't say I have any good memory of Sourceforge. It used to a heavy website with a confusing UI, and never really got better over the years. When Google Code started, I was glad I could move to it, and then GitHub.

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Yeah I don't get this "SourceForge, once a trustworthy source code hosting site" -- that is simply untrue. Maybe for the 1st year or two after its launch, but it has been subject to all sorts of crappy management since at least 1999/2000. I used to have projects there, and contribute to projects there (argh memories of terrible CVS) and it was always slow, always had a terrible UI, and very early in its history became submerged in bad ads and out-links to bad content.

It should just die.

That you misremember it or are too young to know better doesn't mean that it "is simply untrue". It's not, it was valuable for many years. It's your revisionist history that is simply untrue.

It's not revisionist, I'm 40 years old and have been consuming and participating in OSS since before SF existed. It was painful to use, even in the context of the times. Granted, there wasn't really any alternatives in the first few years of its existence.

In the late 90s, Sourceforge (and Freshmeat) were really good places to get software. But even in the early 00s, it felt dusty and dated.

There was a time when it had just opened when it was a really useful place to get opensource software.

The Usenet group alt.comp.freeware converted several people to the idea of open source by having links to sourceforge posted there.

It used to be significantly different:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010418143406/http://sourceforg...

Yeah. I started getting involved with OSS in the mid-00s. I suspect SourceForge's heyday was before that. So SF has always been a slightly shady repository of software in my view, though the adware bundling is a new low.

Yeah, they always had a horribly confusing UI that made it non-obvious how to get to a project's homepage, even -- the thing that should be front and centre! However, I did enjoy playing around with their compile farm when they had that. Think it only lasted a couple of years, though.

Agreed. I remember Sourceforge when it was just getting started and it always had a terrible interface and bad usability. I remember always being annoyed when I was forced to download something through them.

On a side note, looking now at their Wikipedia page, I'm shocked to see that they only started in 1999. I would have place them a year or two earlier in '97 or '98. Anyone else feel this way?

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