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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

Github has a stable business model which depends on their reputation as a host. As I understand it, that isn't something that could ever be said of SourceForge.

I'm not saying github will be around forever, but I highly doubt they'll make the same mistake sourceforge is making now.

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SF was highly reputable back in the day - why else do you think so many projects which have roots back in the 90's are hosted there?

Never say never. 15 years ago nobody would've dreamt SF would have gone this way.

I don't think there were decent alternatives back then. Also, their business model has been based on web advertisement. It's a valid point that GitHub has a solid model and might not need to do shady stuff in the long run.

Agreed. As a high schooler I loved sourceforge. I would talk it up to people and I had a couple of projects that I put up there. I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.

Then I saw that famous talk by Linus on git in 2007 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8). Since I had never managed to get SVN working properly for me git was awesome. No server software to install. By the time I wanted to put up another project on the web Github was a thing and I used that. I never looked back, I loved how it was about the code, not how many installer downloads you had.

That for me was the main problem with sourceforge. In the end it was a game (for the devs) to get the most downloads because that was how your projects were judged and ranked. The Github "game" is slightly better and there are multiple ways to play.

> I'm not saying github will be around forever, but I highly doubt they'll make the same mistake sourceforge is making now.

Github could be sold, just like Sourceforge was sold, and the new owners could behave very differently from the current owners.

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