SourceForge offering "side-loading" installers

Posted Aug 22, 2013 5:21 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
Parent article: SourceForge offering "side-loading" installers

Sourceforge became irrelevant years ago; this would generate more shock (and abandonment) if most serious projects hadn't already abandoned it already.

This does have a positive side: hopefully it's the motivation the stragglers need to start moving out before the lights go off.

I can respect the role Sourceforge had during the early days of Open Source; it was the first major project hosting site, and many great projects had their start there. But this is a pretty clear sign that they've long outgrown the interesting stages of the "first get a million users then figure out how to make money" model.

SourceForge offering "side-loading" installers

Posted Aug 22, 2013 10:20 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

Their new codebase is FOSS (Apache) and a fair bit better than the old PHP based code and probably better than proprietary sites like github. I for one would like to see savane/gforge/fusionforge based sites migrate to it.

SourceForge offering "side-loading" installers

Posted Aug 22, 2013 18:12 UTC (Thu) by wtanksleyjr (subscriber, #74601) [Link]

I'd rather never see any more Sourceforge-inspired pages. I used them back when there was no choice, but it always seemed to me that every feature they had available was the worst choice available, stuck together with barbed wire (that IS hyperbole). Their mailing lists are still unacceptable; their lateness to support any distributed revision control as well (although I admit that here my hyperbole shines, since I liked SVN back when they were early adopters).

Lots of people use SourceForge

Posted Aug 22, 2013 15:26 UTC (Thu) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896) [Link] (3 responses)

Lots of people use SourceForge. They've now switched to a new hosting platform, "Allura", which is reasonable *AND* is open source software itself (hosted by Apache, so SourceForge can't "take it away"). Let's contrast that with github; while github supports the OSS community, the github software itself is proprietary. It is absolutely github's right to do so, and github's generally been a good citizen. But there are reasons to ask questions, too.

Lots of people use SourceForge

Posted Aug 22, 2013 21:14 UTC (Thu) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link] (2 responses)

>*AND* is open source software itself (hosted by Apache, so SourceForge can't "take it away")

Of course they can. It's apache licensed. They simply start basing sf on proprietary fork without releasing the changes back. This sentence is meaningless.

Lots of people use SourceForge

Posted Aug 22, 2013 21:33 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

In all fairness the ability to use a proprietary fork isn't restricted to the Apache licensed stuff; even if the code was pure GPL (and they didn't own it) they could still host it themselves and make any changes they wanted without releasing any new code.

Now the *A*GPL is another matter.

Lots of people use SourceForge

Posted Aug 23, 2013 18:50 UTC (Fri) by makomk (guest, #51493) [Link]

Not only can they do this, it's exactly what happened to the previous "open source" version of the Sourceforge.net website code as soon as they couldn't gain any more commercial advantage from it being open source.

SourceForge offering "side-loading" installers

Posted Sep 1, 2013 12:56 UTC (Sun) by vasi (subscriber, #83946) [Link] (2 responses)

What would you recommend for hosting autotools-based projects? Recall that with autotools, you don't just release the source straight from version control, instead you run "make dist" to generate a source tarball.

GitHub's Releases doesn't support this model well, it leaves you with two similar-looking release files, one of which is a dist tarball and one of which is direct from git. Google Code has deprecated its Downloads area. Sites like Alioth and Savannah are targeted at specific projects only (Debian and FSF). But on Sourceforge, it's easy to just rsync the new dist tarball.

Maybe Launchpad works ok?

SourceForge offering "side-loading" installers

Posted Sep 1, 2013 14:46 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

launchpad does not support git. fedorahosted is alright

SourceForge offering "side-loading" installers

Posted Sep 2, 2013 7:59 UTC (Mon) by peter-b (guest, #66996) [Link]

I use Launchpad for the geda-gaf package (http://www.geda-project.org/ + http://launchpad.net/geda). Launchpad lets me upload 'make dist' release tarballs. On the other hand we have to keep the source code repository elsewhere because Launchpad still has a bzr problem.