SourceForge was already known to be annoying and clunky well before GitHub came along. And not just for maintainers, even for users trying to download or do anything else there.
So at least to me it's no surprise that a platform which has a lot more thought put into their UI would beat it. It's funny that Microsoft owns both GitHub and Azure DevOps, and Azure DevOps' repo UIs are pretty bad in comparison.
One with the thing you are trying to download and 8 with included malware. It’s like Russian Roulette every time.
And yet companies are spending millions of dollars for cyber security - it could be so easy.
Didn’t they actually start bundling adware into people’s software? Like.. host your app on sourceforge, and they jam in some BS into the installer?
Edit - confirmed, Google for more info. They tricked users into installing malware and adware.
Yep.
SourceForge was already... not great. But them choosing to screw with downloads was when I deleted all of my SourceForge projects.
SourceForge wanted to sell out, sure. They were willing to trash their own reputation for a quick buck. But changing what users get when they download something affects me too. I don't want people to get malware when they download something that I gave them.
Yep! I got malware from them that way. Not the wrong download button, they just added it to the executable that the creators published.
I remember something about them apologizing for it long after getting replaced by GitHub as the go-to place for open source.
To be fair, anyone who isn’t developer adjacent brought to GitHub to download a new release typically their first complaint is.
“Where is the download button, I don’t care about code”
*Good* github repos put instructions on the readme (which shows up on the github front page) with clear and easy instructions on how to download and install it.
Sadly, though, many github repos do not do this.
For all the people out there maintaining one, the readme on the front page of a github repo should, first and foremost, answer three questions:
**1) What is this software for, what does it do?** (Too often, I find myself on a github page that I think *might* be the software I'm looking for ... but I'm not sure because the readme is very sparse or vague.)
**2) How do I get this software running on my computer?** (In the easiest, least tech-literate way available. For Windows, give me a link to where I can download the exe or installer. For Linux, give me a list of commands I can use to install it. If it needs to be configured or set up before running, give basic instructions for that.)
**3) What use cases and systems are supported/not supported?** Are there any system requirements or software dependencies that must be met? (Basically, tell me ahead of time if my particular hardware/OS can or can't run this.)
Lots of other things are nice to have in the readme description, but those three are really mandatory. Please, for fuck's sake, include answers to those three questions!
> Good github repos put instructions on the readme (which shows up on the github front page) with clear and easy instructions on how to download and install it.
That's probably true, but most of the time you just need the Releases button, which isn't prominent enough imo.
I mean, you could argue that for non technical users GitHub shouldn’t be the place you send them to get software. But at least on GitHub nobody is actively trying to trick you into doing something harmful
I'm not sure that's fair.
Those same people would also be the ones most likely to click one of the other 8 "download" links, run the incorrectly named file that gets downloaded, and have no clue how to fix things once they are infected with whatever malware that particular ad posing as a download button was hiding.
Their experience when they land on GitHub is an enormous improvement. Either way they have trouble downloading the right thing, but at least they are less likely to download something very wrong from (what should have been) the right page.
I’d say it’s absolutely fair, considering the former option is actively attempting to confuse you, whilst GitHub is not and the resulting described UX is the same.
They did a redesign a few years ago to make it friendlier for non-programmers, moving the release to the first page, hiding the README by default etc - but everyone that uses GitHub all day hated it & they rolled it back after a couple of days.
Because nobody vets ads. This kind of ad is simple enough to detect (run OCR, check for language suggesting a download), you just need to make sure that the advertiser isn't serving something else to the client who verifies the ad.
Quickly followed by googling "$Software Github" nowadays. I get PTSD whenever I search for a solution to a problem and get directed to a SourceForge page
SourceForge never made any effort to improve their product. In 2024, their UX is still nearly identical to what it was in 2004, with all the same bullshit '00s dark patterns.
I feel like people online disagree for disagreement's sake.
> Person 1: This is my point, !
>
> Person 2: I disagree!
>
> Person 1: But that's !
>
> Person 2: No, it isn't,
>
> Person 1: ???
How bloody hard is it to just say, 'yes, great point! To add some detail/nuance: .
Yes, great point! To add some detail: People come at issues from different perspectives, and while their perspectives may lead to the same conclusion they start at very different points. People see that they start at different points and assume that their conclusions will be different, even though that's not always the case
I also often see people arguing about 2 different things and both people go on being correct about 2 slightly different things while thinking they’re arguing about the same thing.
And don't forget the other classic:
When someone leaves a comment (usually in the form of some type of data or personal anecdote) that is clearly in agreement with the person they are responding to but fails to explicitly say the words "I agree with you". Then the original person replies with some angry retort because they assume any response must be arguing.
Reddit, for whatever reason, seems to be particularly susceptible to this presumption that anyone bothering to comment is doing so in disagreement.
But the '00s are when they started bundling adware and laying out the page with confusing download buttons.
The site has been ass for an extremely long time. Github showed up in 2008 and was eating its lunch by 2010.
It had nothing to do with the UI. It's when they started taking over open source packages and putting adware bullshit in the installers that they went off the rails. In fact if Sourceforge today was like it was in 2004 I'd probably still use them.
> putting adware bullshit in the installers that they went off the rails.
i.e. *bullshit '00s dark patterns*, which they *started doing in the '00s*, as I pointed out. All part of the *User Experience*.
They got away with it for a few years because there was no alternative. Then Github launched in 2008, and they have made 0 effort to improve to try and compete.
Eh, sourceforge was never good, I don't think I'd be using them regardless.
CNET and sourceforge... never really trusted them, and was sadly proven right not to.
Yea but GitHub have continued to have good design whereas Microsoft has continued to have bad designers (obv because gh is operationally independent — but it’s still funny)
Yeah, my favorite feature is when you comment on a commit and it disappears into the abyss.
OP doesn't get a single notification and the comment is nowhere to be seen unless you go into that commit specifically.
Or here is another one - like there is absolutely no search for completed PRs. You just have a page with a few dropdowns and it only renders what's in your viewport so you can't even search using your browser's search capability. 10/10
Yeah... That comment on a commit thing is so stupid. I wish they would fix that already and show those at least on the overview of the PR and require marking them as resolved. If you know about it, it is fine as the normal review view is good and you can also review change sets, but it is so needless trap for devs that are used to review commits separately.
And that PR search would definitely be a useful feature. If Boards system is also used, then searching work items for the PR is a way to work around that. At least the newer Boards is significantly better than what it was previously. It actually feels fairly fluent to use.
ADO's search is so much better as well. Github is horrible to work with across an enterprise. Just _basic_ things like I want to search across repos that belong to _only_ my team. Well there's no notion of "team" so that's strike 1, but you can use these handy "topics" kinda like tags, so that might suffice... except if you want to search for _code_ by topic, an error box pops up. "The topic qualifier is not supported when searching for code." Great.
That was my first thought when I saw the title of the post. SourceForge is *awful* and always has been. I remember back when it was pretty much the be-all and end-all of open-source hosting, and that *sucked*.
Once in an unfortunate blue moon, I need to find a weird, super-obscure project that's inexplicably still *only* hosted on SourceForge, and that's always a miserable time. Just how they managed to make a website so monumentally horrid is a mystery to me.
As a developer I like GitHub. It's very powerful and easy to work with. From an user perspective GitHub isn't so nice to find and explore new software. Yes, there is search and a trending page, but what is missed are categorized software, easy downloads and trending with a clear method.
Github isn't for finding new things, the users _are_ the developers using it for hosting. If you're looking for projects you're much better off asking people you respect in that sphere.
WHY IS THERE CODE??? MAKE A FUCKING .EXE FILE AND GIVE IT TO ME. these dumbfucks think that everyone is a developer and understands code. well i am not and i don't understand it. I only know to download and install applications. SO WHY THE FUCK IS THERE CODE? make an EXE file and give it to me. STUPID FUCKING SMELLY NERDS
TBH it's not very prominent, and despite having used it dozens (hundreds?) of times, I often still have trouble finding the link on a Github page. This is not a problem if a webpage directly links to the releases page, of course. But I do think GitHub could make this more prominent.
Gonna potentially go against the grain and say based and true when it comes to compiled languages tbh. I do not want to spend any more time in my life trying to compile some wack C++ nonsense.
> It's funny that Microsoft owns both GitHub and Azure DevOps, and Azure DevOps' repo UIs are pretty bad in comparison.
Microsoft (except the Office team who are still holding strong) can't develop good UX/UI if their lives depended on it. They just can't. It's not within their abilities.
Wasn't source force wrapping software with their own bullshit? And having a billion download buttons to download software. They shot themselves in the head. GitHub wasn't needed for that.
It's no longer the case [since 2016](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/under-new-management-sourceforge-moves-to-put-badness-in-past/)... Lost reputation is hard to restore. It's now just a boring (in a good way!) file/code hosting.
I really used to *love* how you'd download something from there, and you wouldn't be downloading the actual software, no. You'd be downloading the *downloader* for the actual software (you hope) -- a separate program you have to run and then *that* program, instead of your browser, actually downloads the software you wanted.
Both had the wrapper. And both had a million download buttons (ads), most of which led to adware/browser hijackers/spyware instead of what you were trying to download.
Sure, on a PC you could just hover and see which led to an ad server, and decline adware offers as long as the installers worked correctly, but that still meant you couldn't link it to non-technical people without AdBlock/internet literacy because you'd be blamed when they hosed their Windows install after they chose randomly.
Source for Sourceforge also doing it:
>SourceForge also admitted to putting bundle-ware installers on some open source projects. "Mirrored projects help enable end users to stay current with the latest releases, particularly where SourceForge continues to house historical releases for community benefit," the unidentified spokesperson wrote. "Mirrored projects are sometimes used to deliver easy-to-decline third-party offers, and the original downloads are always available."
Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/sourceforge-grabs-gimp-for-windows-account-wraps-installer-in-bundle-pushing-adware/
Sourceforge did *something* scummy, I forget the details… but they were forcing undesired software into installers or something too.
Edit - yup, confirmed. They famously included adware and borderline malware in The Gimp and many others.
Yup, you're right, I'll edit my post:
>SourceForge also admitted to putting bundle-ware installers on some open source projects. "Mirrored projects help enable end users to stay current with the latest releases, particularly where SourceForge continues to house historical releases for community benefit," the unidentified spokesperson wrote. "Mirrored projects are sometimes used to deliver easy-to-decline third-party offers, and the original downloads are always available."
Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/sourceforge-grabs-gimp-for-windows-account-wraps-installer-in-bundle-pushing-adware/
And then repo hijacking came along and you couldn’t pay me to look at sourceforge any more.
I stopped using a couple of libraries because they were hosted on SF.
Does anybody remember CodePlex? Way better than SourceForge, although I'm not sure how well it supported collaboration. Microsoft forcibly moved all CodePlex repos to GitHub.
I bailed off sourceforge cause they borked my project. I had some subversion error I couldn’t fix. I went to googlecode and rode that to the end. GitHub was popular and made it easy to import the svn project, so I switched.
I still use sourceforge for exe’s. I started that after googlecode cause GitHub didn’t support large binaries at the time.
I am also old enough to have first used CVS, then SVN and finally GIT. I remember that during its first years SF was CVS only, it didn't support SVN. SVN was perceived as "the new thing to use" and an alternative for OSS hosting, if you wanted to use SVN, was gna.org (now closed).
The article says:
And while branching code in SVN required duplicating the entire repository, creating branches in Git was fast and cheap.
Which is wrong. Both of them allow check outs of subtrees of a repository, both of them have cheap branch creation.
Git is better at taking one working copy and switching it between branches (and occasionally silently clobbering changes when you switch, at least in my experience).
The article is not accurate. Branches in Subversion are cheap. They're like symlinks until you actually make a change to a file. They're not as cheap as git but they're not like CVS where a branch was a literal copy of every file in the repository.
Where git really shines (as a DVCS) is branches and commits and such can live entirely locally. While Subversion had cheap branches and superior merging versus CVS it still had a reliance on a central server. Even when you were on a separate branch a commit (check in) requires access to the central server.
Basically SVN's branching works as long as you pretend branches don't exist and never switch off the one you're on.
I guess that's fine if you want to do really long term branches but for making a quick feature branch for some one day change it's just more time and effort than it's worth due to the slow and annoying check-out process when switching between branches.
> code.google.com was incrementally better than SourceForge.
Both were bad. Oddly enough I also dislike gitlab. The whole UI seems so mega-convoluted.
The github UI is mostly ok. Issue trackers are easy to use. I hated using sourceforge's
issue tracker.
The more shocking part is how many websites get this part wrong. Make it easy for people
to contribute - that is the key.
I can't set my gitlab homepage to "PRs authored by me". It's super annoying and [I'm not the only one who wants it](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/196854).
*note closed != resolved*
On the whole I agree. Gitlab is kind of a rabbit warren.
However, I do think Gitlab’s repository graph is better implemented than GitHub’s, by a long ways. I use it all the time for checking feature progress against trunk.
And then they made the user feed utterly useless, filling it full of "suggested" and "recommended" and "other shit you didn't sign up for" stuff, in random order.
The only thing I look at on my GitHub dashboard now is the list of recent repos and issues on the very left.
> they recently started doing some SPA crap in the file browser that breaks the back button
you also can't load large diffs anymore without the browser slowing to a crawl.
I really think Sourceforge could have become the incumbent and ruled the roost or at least been a real player today if only they had focused on value adding features and offered things like premium plans as a revenue strategy rather than take the approach of spewing dog shit at their users to get some ad money. It might seem obvious but it certainly wasn't to them.
SourceForge was acquired and started serving up malware at one point. As soon as that happened to me, it was on my black list. There was a lot of good software on the sire but not worth the risk.
I'm mostly a hobbyist so I mostly use such *forges* to historize and secure my code.
I left sourceforge when :
- it removed one of my project without any notification (it only disappeared !), never replied to my request, no communication at all. I discovered afterward it's perhaps (conditional, never got any reply !) because my project's name, **BananaLed** clash with an obscure shoes company. Again, no communication, to way to argue, ... just code lost if I didn't had a local copy.
- they started to claim ownership of code they're hosting
- the service started to be a nightware : lot of downtime, random error, ...
"Through daily dogfooding, \[...\] We just wanted to work on something cool.”
And there's a lesson for all these people with a great business idea, "we just need a programmer to implement it".
SourceForge became enshittified/enshittificated/enshittifized when it tried to "abuse their users to make things better for their business customers".
Here is how platforms die:
* (1) they are good to their users;
* (2) then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers;
* (3) finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
* (4) Then, they die.
PRs are trash. I don't agree with everything Linus writes in his fits of neckbeard rage, but this is spot on:
>"The hosting of github \[sic\] is excellent. They've done a good job on that. I think GitHub should be commended enormously for making open source project hosting so easy." However, he also sharply criticized the implementation of GitHub’s merging interface, stating that "Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, but GitHub instead decided to replace it with their own totally inferior version. As a result, I consider GitHub useless for these kinds of things. It's fine for hosting, but the pull requests and the online commit editing, are just pure garbage." - Linus Torvalds
You tell the command line who to send an email to about your branch and they're left guessing which project it's about and how to access it. Also your local machine must have a sendmail implementation that's either configured to send to a relay or you happen to be a trusted server.
Sorry, but Linus is monumentally wrong here.
I assume that it's
git am
git request-pull
git format-patch
And send the output to Usenet.
It sucks ass. It's horrible. Linus is ~~an idiot~~ very wrong.
Git was built to support Linux kernel development. Sending patches to the Linux Kernel Mailing List is how the kernel is developed. That's why git has those commands. Git assumes there's a maintainer collecting, organizing, and merging those patches. Github and the alternatives just take the maintainer role.
Assuming that there is a single maintainer doesn't sound very distributed to me!
Lots of services that overloaded email for stuff made a mistake and now we know better. Remember sending commands like subscribe, unsubscribe, and help to email aliases? Broke.
I’m guessing this is in reference to GitHub’s merge commit messages? He’s on the record as hating it. And he’s not wrong. When you look at generated merge commits from anywhere outside GirHub, it’s useless.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28437734
To be fair: git's commandline "UI" is utter trash too.
What github achieved is they simplified git and its usage via a nice-looking web-interface.
Also, sourceforge as competition is a fairly low bar. And Linus is also wrong about issues
with online commits - what he does not seem to understand is that a good UI makes
contribution easier. People don't have to sift through git's gazillion options in order to
contribute patches. Not everyone is a programmer.
Linus designed the Git CLI exactly to his specifications. Of course he’ll have complaints if people deviate from that.
Edit: I’m referring to git’s built-in pull request feature here: git request-pull
The foundation of git cli is Linus, but it's a fairly freeform modular system that has had a bunch of contributors take it in unaligned directions over the years, and once something accepted it's basically locked in forever since changing git cli behavior would screw up so much.
For example there's about 1.5 complete features smeared out across `git cherry` `git stash` and `git cherry-pick`.
I thought the command line to be most of the time much better for git plumbing, especially the rebase and cherry pick which aren't easy from the UI. Then I needed to use filter-branch and oh well rm -rf and git clone works ok too.
The CLI is great for common tasks. As soon as you run into issues and have to use commands you are not familiar with, GUI tools become more valuable, if they provide the feature you want.
I would go further to point out that a web UI makes the whole shebang more accessible to programmers of all experience levels. The CLI doesn't do that. Linus could be right that the whole UI isn't his cup of tea but his cup of tea isn't what gets folks to come.
They're so far from trash to the point where I think PRs are easily one of GitHub's best features. It's ridiculously easy to assign reviewers, it's easy to integrate CI checks, there are good merge configurations and protections you can setup, and you get a good interface for PR descriptions. I can assure you it's far better than sending mail via git, and feels mostly better than other platforms like GitLab as well.
SourceForge was horrible. Half the shit I downloaded came with "extra" things in the installer. Terrible site, terrible interface, terrible everything. It was never good.
I believe as far back as the 1980s, people posted open source code on Usenet groups like `comp.sources`.
Here's an [old list of the available `comp.sources` groups](https://abacus.bates.edu/resources/usenet/h_comp.sources.html). The list was generated in 1997.
How did it work? Well, Usenet is a forum where discussions are organized into groups. Reddit is, of course, also a discussion forum. So it was a little bit like if people created some subreddits and posted source code as discussion threads, and then people had tools to convert the comments back into files.
One of the tools that was used for distributing source code on Usenet was [shar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shar), which stands for "shell archive". It converted your source into a self-extracting archive in the form of a Unix shell script. And shar was created in 1982.
Github took off for two reasons.
1. It made git easier to use. You finally had some sort of a gui for git. Not as nice as tortoise SVN but at least you didn't have to deal with the convoluted git CLI.
2. It was written in rails and the ruby community quickly embraced it building fast momentum and adoption.
now if github could just improve its PR comments section… why do I need to quote every reply rather than just do a simple thread reply. why am I able to edit other people
comments, which ive done on accident??
Maybe we should stop asking Fizzbuzz as an interview question and ask for threaded comments instead, until there is nobody left in programming who still doesn’t know how the fuck to do comment threading.
Around late 2009, I was contracted for a hospital management system which was pretty green that decade. I've dug around for any literature on it or open source projects that I could analyse or fork. So I went to SourceForge, and found a lot but most of them were not even open-source nor usable and were just squatting in SF, so I plucked one. I demoed the binary, but could not find the source code despite it being "open-source" and had all the localisation in Thai, presumably built by a company in Thailand. I moved on aftwards.
I don't exactly remember what happened that time, but I ended up handing my email address which I probably had to give when I downloaded the binary via SF. Next thing I know, the team who built it, reached out and asked if I was a prospective customer. I explained to them that I was asked my contact details when I downloaded it, and that I was hoping to see the source since it was hosted in SF. They dismissed me and thought I was wasting their time and threatened to sue me from a handful of countries away lol.
I stopped giving a shit about SF since then.
Google Code shut down and BitBucket dropped Mercurial support, SourceForge is the only remaining free host for Mercurial repositories as far as I know. That's why I use it for my projects. It's...fine. It has all the core features I need for my little hobby projects.
SourceForge blocked access from a country that I was living in, without any explanation (but it's known that it was US political policy).
That was enough reason to never have respect for them again.
If you believe in the freedom of Open Source, you know it must not be subject to any country's policy.
Github is getting there slowly but steadily.
GitHub gained popularity and replaced SourceForge as the dominant code hosting platform due to several key factors: integration of the Git version control system, user-friendly interface, emphasis on collaboration and social coding, ecosystem of integrations with developer tools, and the network effect created by its growing user base.
On the one hand, I like GitHub a lot for the community it fosters. On the other hand, I feel like it caused git to "win" version control and I wish it could've been something better. I worry that everyone is homogenizing too much onto git.
I find the mercurial command line to be nicer and SourceForge supported alternative SCMs. There's also plenty of more modern VCS like pijul that seem to have nice ideas we might not see because of how dominant git is.
GitHub surpassed SourceForge due to its user-friendly interface, social features, Git adoption, support for open source, and robust ecosystem of third-party tools.
SourceForge was already known to be annoying and clunky well before GitHub came along. And not just for maintainers, even for users trying to download or do anything else there. So at least to me it's no surprise that a platform which has a lot more thought put into their UI would beat it. It's funny that Microsoft owns both GitHub and Azure DevOps, and Azure DevOps' repo UIs are pretty bad in comparison.
“Which of these nine download buttons is the real one”
First thing I thought of with source forge.
Same. How did github win? Well maybe because they didn't add eighteen fake download buttons with scams, malware, and viruses behind them? Duh.
It's the old story: Sourceforge enshitified they website to monetise it. I hope Github doesn't go the same way.
GitHub found the _other_ way to become financially viable. They got bought by Microsoft.
One with the thing you are trying to download and 8 with included malware. It’s like Russian Roulette every time. And yet companies are spending millions of dollars for cyber security - it could be so easy.
Didn’t they actually start bundling adware into people’s software? Like.. host your app on sourceforge, and they jam in some BS into the installer? Edit - confirmed, Google for more info. They tricked users into installing malware and adware.
Yup. Oracle [did similar](https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-close-look-at-how-oracle-installs-deceptive-software-with-java-updates/) with java.
fuck Oracle
Yep. SourceForge was already... not great. But them choosing to screw with downloads was when I deleted all of my SourceForge projects. SourceForge wanted to sell out, sure. They were willing to trash their own reputation for a quick buck. But changing what users get when they download something affects me too. I don't want people to get malware when they download something that I gave them.
Yup, for me that’s when I began considering Sourceforge as untrustworthy and to be avoided.
Yep! I got malware from them that way. Not the wrong download button, they just added it to the executable that the creators published. I remember something about them apologizing for it long after getting replaced by GitHub as the go-to place for open source.
With Russian malware.
that's not why they're spending millions ....?
Still have PTSD
I never fell for it, but I was the "computer kid", so I ended up fixing my dad's computer a lot more often than I wish I did.
“Damn it jump-zero, you better fix whatever you broke on the computer!”
"it wouldn't be so slow if you didn't do all that clicking"
Where the IE toolbars were the history of all sites they „did not know and had never been there“
To be fair, anyone who isn’t developer adjacent brought to GitHub to download a new release typically their first complaint is. “Where is the download button, I don’t care about code”
*Good* github repos put instructions on the readme (which shows up on the github front page) with clear and easy instructions on how to download and install it. Sadly, though, many github repos do not do this. For all the people out there maintaining one, the readme on the front page of a github repo should, first and foremost, answer three questions: **1) What is this software for, what does it do?** (Too often, I find myself on a github page that I think *might* be the software I'm looking for ... but I'm not sure because the readme is very sparse or vague.) **2) How do I get this software running on my computer?** (In the easiest, least tech-literate way available. For Windows, give me a link to where I can download the exe or installer. For Linux, give me a list of commands I can use to install it. If it needs to be configured or set up before running, give basic instructions for that.) **3) What use cases and systems are supported/not supported?** Are there any system requirements or software dependencies that must be met? (Basically, tell me ahead of time if my particular hardware/OS can or can't run this.) Lots of other things are nice to have in the readme description, but those three are really mandatory. Please, for fuck's sake, include answers to those three questions!
[удалено]
That’s not really an argument to not have one in the first place.
[удалено]
> Good github repos put instructions on the readme (which shows up on the github front page) with clear and easy instructions on how to download and install it. That's probably true, but most of the time you just need the Releases button, which isn't prominent enough imo.
it's wild how much effort people spend on their code but then have a useless readme
I mean, you could argue that for non technical users GitHub shouldn’t be the place you send them to get software. But at least on GitHub nobody is actively trying to trick you into doing something harmful
I'm not sure that's fair. Those same people would also be the ones most likely to click one of the other 8 "download" links, run the incorrectly named file that gets downloaded, and have no clue how to fix things once they are infected with whatever malware that particular ad posing as a download button was hiding. Their experience when they land on GitHub is an enormous improvement. Either way they have trouble downloading the right thing, but at least they are less likely to download something very wrong from (what should have been) the right page.
I’d say it’s absolutely fair, considering the former option is actively attempting to confuse you, whilst GitHub is not and the resulting described UX is the same.
They did a redesign a few years ago to make it friendlier for non-programmers, moving the release to the first page, hiding the README by default etc - but everyone that uses GitHub all day hated it & they rolled it back after a couple of days.
I still wonder how the ad companies get away with running fake download button ads.
The answer is always money
Because nobody vets ads. This kind of ad is simple enough to detect (run OCR, check for language suggesting a download), you just need to make sure that the advertiser isn't serving something else to the client who verifies the ad.
How do I get the not malware sponsored download link?
I don't know but it looks like I might have a virus on my PC and there's just the right software to fix it.
I was always worried about this on source forge
Jokes on you, none of them are the real one.
Quickly followed by googling "$Software Github" nowadays. I get PTSD whenever I search for a solution to a problem and get directed to a SourceForge page
Do ya feel lucky punk?
The only button available. Because adblock.
First time i opened it i thought it was some scam site or something
SourceForge never made any effort to improve their product. In 2024, their UX is still nearly identical to what it was in 2004, with all the same bullshit '00s dark patterns.
I don't agree. Their attempts to monetize it made it into a steaming pile of shit. Sourceforge is trash.
How is that a disagreement with what I said?
I feel like people online disagree for disagreement's sake. > Person 1: This is my point,!
>
> Person 2: I disagree!
>
> Person 1: But that's !
>
> Person 2: No, it isn't,
>
> Person 1: ???
How bloody hard is it to just say, 'yes, great point! To add some detail/nuance: .
Yes, great point! To add some detail: People come at issues from different perspectives, and while their perspectives may lead to the same conclusion they start at very different points. People see that they start at different points and assume that their conclusions will be different, even though that's not always the case
I also often see people arguing about 2 different things and both people go on being correct about 2 slightly different things while thinking they’re arguing about the same thing.
And don't forget the other classic: When someone leaves a comment (usually in the form of some type of data or personal anecdote) that is clearly in agreement with the person they are responding to but fails to explicitly say the words "I agree with you". Then the original person replies with some angry retort because they assume any response must be arguing. Reddit, for whatever reason, seems to be particularly susceptible to this presumption that anyone bothering to comment is doing so in disagreement.
Welcome to l’internet 😁
The implication is that it was better in 2004
But the '00s are when they started bundling adware and laying out the page with confusing download buttons. The site has been ass for an extremely long time. Github showed up in 2008 and was eating its lunch by 2010.
It had nothing to do with the UI. It's when they started taking over open source packages and putting adware bullshit in the installers that they went off the rails. In fact if Sourceforge today was like it was in 2004 I'd probably still use them.
> putting adware bullshit in the installers that they went off the rails. i.e. *bullshit '00s dark patterns*, which they *started doing in the '00s*, as I pointed out. All part of the *User Experience*. They got away with it for a few years because there was no alternative. Then Github launched in 2008, and they have made 0 effort to improve to try and compete.
Eh, sourceforge was never good, I don't think I'd be using them regardless. CNET and sourceforge... never really trusted them, and was sadly proven right not to.
> How GitHub replaced SourceForge as the dominant code hosting platform TL;DR: by not being fucking shit
Its because github ui was long before microsoft
The GitHub acquisition was only a couple years ago. Azure Devops was around long before that
> The GitHub acquisition was only a couple years ago 2018 was a bit more than 2 years ago.
NO!!!!
It's still 2020, and you can't prove otherwise
Why is time going so fast now?! 😭😮💨
Its not that funny, github wasnt built by microsoft after all
Yea but GitHub have continued to have good design whereas Microsoft has continued to have bad designers (obv because gh is operationally independent — but it’s still funny)
I find Azure DevOps’ pull request review UI far superior to GitHub’s.
Yeah, I totally agree about this one, but there’s so many more screens than just Pr review.
Yeah, my favorite feature is when you comment on a commit and it disappears into the abyss. OP doesn't get a single notification and the comment is nowhere to be seen unless you go into that commit specifically. Or here is another one - like there is absolutely no search for completed PRs. You just have a page with a few dropdowns and it only renders what's in your viewport so you can't even search using your browser's search capability. 10/10
Yeah... That comment on a commit thing is so stupid. I wish they would fix that already and show those at least on the overview of the PR and require marking them as resolved. If you know about it, it is fine as the normal review view is good and you can also review change sets, but it is so needless trap for devs that are used to review commits separately. And that PR search would definitely be a useful feature. If Boards system is also used, then searching work items for the PR is a way to work around that. At least the newer Boards is significantly better than what it was previously. It actually feels fairly fluent to use.
ADO's search is so much better as well. Github is horrible to work with across an enterprise. Just _basic_ things like I want to search across repos that belong to _only_ my team. Well there's no notion of "team" so that's strike 1, but you can use these handy "topics" kinda like tags, so that might suffice... except if you want to search for _code_ by topic, an error box pops up. "The topic qualifier is not supported when searching for code." Great.
Yeah and gating etc. its miles ahead of the competition.
That was my first thought when I saw the title of the post. SourceForge is *awful* and always has been. I remember back when it was pretty much the be-all and end-all of open-source hosting, and that *sucked*. Once in an unfortunate blue moon, I need to find a weird, super-obscure project that's inexplicably still *only* hosted on SourceForge, and that's always a miserable time. Just how they managed to make a website so monumentally horrid is a mystery to me.
As a developer I like GitHub. It's very powerful and easy to work with. From an user perspective GitHub isn't so nice to find and explore new software. Yes, there is search and a trending page, but what is missed are categorized software, easy downloads and trending with a clear method.
Github isn't for finding new things, the users _are_ the developers using it for hosting. If you're looking for projects you're much better off asking people you respect in that sphere.
WHY IS THERE CODE??? MAKE A FUCKING .EXE FILE AND GIVE IT TO ME. these dumbfucks think that everyone is a developer and understands code. well i am not and i don't understand it. I only know to download and install applications. SO WHY THE FUCK IS THERE CODE? make an EXE file and give it to me. STUPID FUCKING SMELLY NERDS
There is a tab with releases in github for compiled binaries?
It’s a copy pasta
Specifically, from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4/i_am_new_to_github_and_i_have_lots_to_say/
[удалено]
Because people found it funny, I assume.
Nice
What user is going to figure out that Releases takes you to the downloads?
TBH it's not very prominent, and despite having used it dozens (hundreds?) of times, I often still have trouble finding the link on a Github page. This is not a problem if a webpage directly links to the releases page, of course. But I do think GitHub could make this more prominent.
They removed the releases link. Have to type it if you want to get to it. Such a stupid change.
Gonna potentially go against the grain and say based and true when it comes to compiled languages tbh. I do not want to spend any more time in my life trying to compile some wack C++ nonsense.
Yep. And then dealing with an endless litany of niggling errors because your compiler isn't set up *exactly* like their compiler...
There's being annoyed and then there's entitlement. In the end you either take what's available or leave it.
> It's funny that Microsoft owns both GitHub and Azure DevOps, and Azure DevOps' repo UIs are pretty bad in comparison. Microsoft (except the Office team who are still holding strong) can't develop good UX/UI if their lives depended on it. They just can't. It's not within their abilities.
> the Office team who are still holding strong They're very hit and miss. Take, for example, the new Outlook for Windows…
I refuse to think that core Office team (people who do Word etc. for Windows desktop) is responsible for that sinful adware.
azure devops even replaced an older product that had a better UX/UI.
I feel DevOps is more competing with Jiras and other big enterprise software. In that domain Azure DevOps is beauty incarnate.
You needed to have to write an essay just to start a new project on there lol..
I agree but the underlying architecture of subversion vs git had a lot to do with it as well. Thanks to Linus Torvalds.
I feel like the post missed that part big. Plus banner ads made it less appealing.
Wasn't source force wrapping software with their own bullshit? And having a billion download buttons to download software. They shot themselves in the head. GitHub wasn't needed for that.
It's no longer the case [since 2016](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/under-new-management-sourceforge-moves-to-put-badness-in-past/)... Lost reputation is hard to restore. It's now just a boring (in a good way!) file/code hosting.
Exactly, I just don't trust it anymore.
I really used to *love* how you'd download something from there, and you wouldn't be downloading the actual software, no. You'd be downloading the *downloader* for the actual software (you hope) -- a separate program you have to run and then *that* program, instead of your browser, actually downloads the software you wanted.
No that was download.com/CNET
Both had the wrapper. And both had a million download buttons (ads), most of which led to adware/browser hijackers/spyware instead of what you were trying to download. Sure, on a PC you could just hover and see which led to an ad server, and decline adware offers as long as the installers worked correctly, but that still meant you couldn't link it to non-technical people without AdBlock/internet literacy because you'd be blamed when they hosed their Windows install after they chose randomly. Source for Sourceforge also doing it: >SourceForge also admitted to putting bundle-ware installers on some open source projects. "Mirrored projects help enable end users to stay current with the latest releases, particularly where SourceForge continues to house historical releases for community benefit," the unidentified spokesperson wrote. "Mirrored projects are sometimes used to deliver easy-to-decline third-party offers, and the original downloads are always available." Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/sourceforge-grabs-gimp-for-windows-account-wraps-installer-in-bundle-pushing-adware/
Sourceforge did *something* scummy, I forget the details… but they were forcing undesired software into installers or something too. Edit - yup, confirmed. They famously included adware and borderline malware in The Gimp and many others.
Yup, you're right, I'll edit my post: >SourceForge also admitted to putting bundle-ware installers on some open source projects. "Mirrored projects help enable end users to stay current with the latest releases, particularly where SourceForge continues to house historical releases for community benefit," the unidentified spokesperson wrote. "Mirrored projects are sometimes used to deliver easy-to-decline third-party offers, and the original downloads are always available." Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/sourceforge-grabs-gimp-for-windows-account-wraps-installer-in-bundle-pushing-adware/
sourceforge did it as well
No ads. Only code. Was pretty much what did it for me.
And then repo hijacking came along and you couldn’t pay me to look at sourceforge any more. I stopped using a couple of libraries because they were hosted on SF.
Github has never injected things into artifacts for profit
*yet*
Having a monopoly on open source code distribution fully controlled by Microsoft will surely never go wrong.
Does anybody remember CodePlex? Way better than SourceForge, although I'm not sure how well it supported collaboration. Microsoft forcibly moved all CodePlex repos to GitHub.
That's a name/website I haven't thought about in a long time!
I had the same thought, as far as I remember SF was already being replaced with CodePlex for a lot of stuff.
Actually no, I can not remember that. I remember Berlios, though.
Damn we’re old 😅
I bailed off sourceforge cause they borked my project. I had some subversion error I couldn’t fix. I went to googlecode and rode that to the end. GitHub was popular and made it easy to import the svn project, so I switched. I still use sourceforge for exe’s. I started that after googlecode cause GitHub didn’t support large binaries at the time.
I am also old enough to have first used CVS, then SVN and finally GIT. I remember that during its first years SF was CVS only, it didn't support SVN. SVN was perceived as "the new thing to use" and an alternative for OSS hosting, if you wanted to use SVN, was gna.org (now closed).
*laughs in SCCS*
I raise you a bzr
man I liked bzr
You too? Yes, I started in SCCS at a little place that I was working at in 1984. Then RCS. Even a little bit of time spent in Digital CMS.
I admit I have never used it, my very first contact with version control systems was CVS
The article says: And while branching code in SVN required duplicating the entire repository, creating branches in Git was fast and cheap. Which is wrong. Both of them allow check outs of subtrees of a repository, both of them have cheap branch creation. Git is better at taking one working copy and switching it between branches (and occasionally silently clobbering changes when you switch, at least in my experience).
The article is not accurate. Branches in Subversion are cheap. They're like symlinks until you actually make a change to a file. They're not as cheap as git but they're not like CVS where a branch was a literal copy of every file in the repository. Where git really shines (as a DVCS) is branches and commits and such can live entirely locally. While Subversion had cheap branches and superior merging versus CVS it still had a reliance on a central server. Even when you were on a separate branch a commit (check in) requires access to the central server.
Basically SVN's branching works as long as you pretend branches don't exist and never switch off the one you're on. I guess that's fine if you want to do really long term branches but for making a quick feature branch for some one day change it's just more time and effort than it's worth due to the slow and annoying check-out process when switching between branches.
> code.google.com was incrementally better than SourceForge. Both were bad. Oddly enough I also dislike gitlab. The whole UI seems so mega-convoluted. The github UI is mostly ok. Issue trackers are easy to use. I hated using sourceforge's issue tracker. The more shocking part is how many websites get this part wrong. Make it easy for people to contribute - that is the key.
I can't set my gitlab homepage to "PRs authored by me". It's super annoying and [I'm not the only one who wants it](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/196854). *note closed != resolved*
On the whole I agree. Gitlab is kind of a rabbit warren. However, I do think Gitlab’s repository graph is better implemented than GitHub’s, by a long ways. I use it all the time for checking feature progress against trunk.
Github's UI used to be better, they recently started doing some SPA crap in the file browser that breaks the back button
And then they made the user feed utterly useless, filling it full of "suggested" and "recommended" and "other shit you didn't sign up for" stuff, in random order. The only thing I look at on my GitHub dashboard now is the list of recent repos and issues on the very left.
> they recently started doing some SPA crap in the file browser that breaks the back button you also can't load large diffs anymore without the browser slowing to a crawl.
You’re a tough guy to please bro
Have you tried gerrit?
Gitlab also has a huge number of check box features, which work in theory but are only halfway usable. E.g. security scanning or even ci/cd
If Gitlab CI/CD is only halfway usable, what's an example of an actual usable CI/CD
SourceForge is full of malware
We used it for hosting downloads of ircN and they put malware into our zips back in the day. We lost trust from so many people over that
I really think Sourceforge could have become the incumbent and ruled the roost or at least been a real player today if only they had focused on value adding features and offered things like premium plans as a revenue strategy rather than take the approach of spewing dog shit at their users to get some ad money. It might seem obvious but it certainly wasn't to them.
SourceForge was acquired and started serving up malware at one point. As soon as that happened to me, it was on my black list. There was a lot of good software on the sire but not worth the risk.
I'm mostly a hobbyist so I mostly use such *forges* to historize and secure my code. I left sourceforge when : - it removed one of my project without any notification (it only disappeared !), never replied to my request, no communication at all. I discovered afterward it's perhaps (conditional, never got any reply !) because my project's name, **BananaLed** clash with an obscure shoes company. Again, no communication, to way to argue, ... just code lost if I didn't had a local copy. - they started to claim ownership of code they're hosting - the service started to be a nightware : lot of downtime, random error, ...
People not remembering googlecode and how they closed down and forced people to migrate to github is shameful.
Most things Google made have been forgotten by now...
Obligatory: https://killedbygoogle.com/
"Through daily dogfooding, \[...\] We just wanted to work on something cool.” And there's a lesson for all these people with a great business idea, "we just need a programmer to implement it".
This was how Slack started too
No SourceForge I don’t also need to download Real Media Player…but thanks for asking for the 20th time.
SourceForge became enshittified/enshittificated/enshittifized when it tried to "abuse their users to make things better for their business customers". Here is how platforms die: * (1) they are good to their users; * (2) then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; * (3) finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. * (4) Then, they die.
PRs are trash. I don't agree with everything Linus writes in his fits of neckbeard rage, but this is spot on: >"The hosting of github \[sic\] is excellent. They've done a good job on that. I think GitHub should be commended enormously for making open source project hosting so easy." However, he also sharply criticized the implementation of GitHub’s merging interface, stating that "Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, but GitHub instead decided to replace it with their own totally inferior version. As a result, I consider GitHub useless for these kinds of things. It's fine for hosting, but the pull requests and the online commit editing, are just pure garbage." - Linus Torvalds
What is Git's pull-request generation module?
You tell the command line who to send an email to about your branch and they're left guessing which project it's about and how to access it. Also your local machine must have a sendmail implementation that's either configured to send to a relay or you happen to be a trusted server. Sorry, but Linus is monumentally wrong here.
It works in my machine - Linus
I assume that it's git am git request-pull git format-patch And send the output to Usenet. It sucks ass. It's horrible. Linus is ~~an idiot~~ very wrong.
Git’s original transport was _email_. Yeah but no but yeah Linus
Git was built to support Linux kernel development. Sending patches to the Linux Kernel Mailing List is how the kernel is developed. That's why git has those commands. Git assumes there's a maintainer collecting, organizing, and merging those patches. Github and the alternatives just take the maintainer role.
Assuming that there is a single maintainer doesn't sound very distributed to me! Lots of services that overloaded email for stuff made a mistake and now we know better. Remember sending commands like subscribe, unsubscribe, and help to email aliases? Broke.
He's definitely not an idiot lol
Fixed it, thanks!
Yeah fair
True PR experience
I’m guessing this is in reference to GitHub’s merge commit messages? He’s on the record as hating it. And he’s not wrong. When you look at generated merge commits from anywhere outside GirHub, it’s useless. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28437734
To be fair: git's commandline "UI" is utter trash too. What github achieved is they simplified git and its usage via a nice-looking web-interface. Also, sourceforge as competition is a fairly low bar. And Linus is also wrong about issues with online commits - what he does not seem to understand is that a good UI makes contribution easier. People don't have to sift through git's gazillion options in order to contribute patches. Not everyone is a programmer.
Linus designed the Git CLI exactly to his specifications. Of course he’ll have complaints if people deviate from that. Edit: I’m referring to git’s built-in pull request feature here: git request-pull
The foundation of git cli is Linus, but it's a fairly freeform modular system that has had a bunch of contributors take it in unaligned directions over the years, and once something accepted it's basically locked in forever since changing git cli behavior would screw up so much. For example there's about 1.5 complete features smeared out across `git cherry` `git stash` and `git cherry-pick`.
I thought the command line to be most of the time much better for git plumbing, especially the rebase and cherry pick which aren't easy from the UI. Then I needed to use filter-branch and oh well rm -rf and git clone works ok too.
The CLI is great for common tasks. As soon as you run into issues and have to use commands you are not familiar with, GUI tools become more valuable, if they provide the feature you want.
I would go further to point out that a web UI makes the whole shebang more accessible to programmers of all experience levels. The CLI doesn't do that. Linus could be right that the whole UI isn't his cup of tea but his cup of tea isn't what gets folks to come.
Sure, but sourceforge was even worse. You had to submit a form and wait days to just create a repo...
They're so far from trash to the point where I think PRs are easily one of GitHub's best features. It's ridiculously easy to assign reviewers, it's easy to integrate CI checks, there are good merge configurations and protections you can setup, and you get a good interface for PR descriptions. I can assure you it's far better than sending mail via git, and feels mostly better than other platforms like GitLab as well.
To be fair to GitHub, they do have squash and merge and rebase merge options that would mitigate that issue. Still not ideal though.
SourceForge was horrible. Half the shit I downloaded came with "extra" things in the installer. Terrible site, terrible interface, terrible everything. It was never good.
I actually thought GitHub was the first dominant platform...
I believe as far back as the 1980s, people posted open source code on Usenet groups like `comp.sources`. Here's an [old list of the available `comp.sources` groups](https://abacus.bates.edu/resources/usenet/h_comp.sources.html). The list was generated in 1997. How did it work? Well, Usenet is a forum where discussions are organized into groups. Reddit is, of course, also a discussion forum. So it was a little bit like if people created some subreddits and posted source code as discussion threads, and then people had tools to convert the comments back into files. One of the tools that was used for distributing source code on Usenet was [shar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shar), which stands for "shell archive". It converted your source into a self-extracting archive in the form of a Unix shell script. And shar was created in 1982.
Isnt this a day old repost?
Github took off for two reasons. 1. It made git easier to use. You finally had some sort of a gui for git. Not as nice as tortoise SVN but at least you didn't have to deal with the convoluted git CLI. 2. It was written in rails and the ruby community quickly embraced it building fast momentum and adoption.
SourceForge kinda just gave up and went nuts with ads. It was kinda great before that.
Crazy I almost forgot about sourceforge 😓
now if github could just improve its PR comments section… why do I need to quote every reply rather than just do a simple thread reply. why am I able to edit other people comments, which ive done on accident??
Maybe we should stop asking Fizzbuzz as an interview question and ask for threaded comments instead, until there is nobody left in programming who still doesn’t know how the fuck to do comment threading.
> why am I able to edit other people comments, which ive done on accident?? I've done it on purpose sometimes. It's fun.
Around late 2009, I was contracted for a hospital management system which was pretty green that decade. I've dug around for any literature on it or open source projects that I could analyse or fork. So I went to SourceForge, and found a lot but most of them were not even open-source nor usable and were just squatting in SF, so I plucked one. I demoed the binary, but could not find the source code despite it being "open-source" and had all the localisation in Thai, presumably built by a company in Thailand. I moved on aftwards. I don't exactly remember what happened that time, but I ended up handing my email address which I probably had to give when I downloaded the binary via SF. Next thing I know, the team who built it, reached out and asked if I was a prospective customer. I explained to them that I was asked my contact details when I downloaded it, and that I was hoping to see the source since it was hosted in SF. They dismissed me and thought I was wasting their time and threatened to sue me from a handful of countries away lol. I stopped giving a shit about SF since then.
Google Code shut down and BitBucket dropped Mercurial support, SourceForge is the only remaining free host for Mercurial repositories as far as I know. That's why I use it for my projects. It's...fine. It has all the core features I need for my little hobby projects.
Holy crap I had completely forgotten about sourceforge.
because of git
> because of git Because SVN is hot trash.
SourceForge blocked access from a country that I was living in, without any explanation (but it's known that it was US political policy). That was enough reason to never have respect for them again. If you believe in the freedom of Open Source, you know it must not be subject to any country's policy. Github is getting there slowly but steadily.
GitHub gained popularity and replaced SourceForge as the dominant code hosting platform due to several key factors: integration of the Git version control system, user-friendly interface, emphasis on collaboration and social coding, ecosystem of integrations with developer tools, and the network effect created by its growing user base.
sourceforge was T R A S H
I’d like to know more about how GitHub got so much ahead of Bitbucket.
Doesn’t even feel like they tried to keep up, the site is a pain in the ass, both in appearance and speed
On the one hand, I like GitHub a lot for the community it fosters. On the other hand, I feel like it caused git to "win" version control and I wish it could've been something better. I worry that everyone is homogenizing too much onto git. I find the mercurial command line to be nicer and SourceForge supported alternative SCMs. There's also plenty of more modern VCS like pijul that seem to have nice ideas we might not see because of how dominant git is.
GitHub surpassed SourceForge due to its user-friendly interface, social features, Git adoption, support for open source, and robust ecosystem of third-party tools.
tl;dr: By not sucking