GitHub, Collaboration, and Haters

While I don't really approve of the anti-sourceforge attitude, I do understand it; when SF had essentially a monopoly on open source project storage, they chose to milk it and rest on their laurels rather than improve themselves. People complained about how SF broke wget with their download portals for something like four years before SF did something about it. SF's forced review of every project creation (and their gigantic delay in doing so) had a strong chilling effect on open source project creation in general.<p>A lazy monopoly has a way of generating extreme hatred due to the impotent rage of the people that use it because they have no other option. SF may have drastically improved in the presence of competition, but it's no surprise that some people are still angry.

Three years ago I attended an "open-source CEO" dinner, at which I was seated between the CEOs of SourceForge and CollabNet (founder and principal proponent of the Subversion VCS). I asked the CollabNet CEO what he thought about Git, and he was dismissive, indicating that Subversion had already won. I then asked the SourceForge CEO if he knew about GitHub; he was vaguely familiar with them, but appeared utterly unconcerned. I thought to myself, <i>All the battles have been fought and lost, and these guys don't even know there's a war.</i>

The reason why GitHub has become so popular is due to the fact they put code and developers first. Surfing to a repo doesn't bring some overview or ads page.<p>Opening a repo actually show useful stuff for me as a developer. The source is there together with an optionally inlined README file, rendered with popular micro markups. Then add the ease of forking and you clearly get something people really like. This style of presentation isn't of course for everybody. But GitHub chose to target developers above end-users.<p>GitHub could have been "SVNHub" or "hghub" for all I care, the technology is secondary in this case (but close behind).

SourceForge is a business, not a charity project. If they were providing this service out of the kindness of their hearts, I'd absolutely agree that people should knock it off.<p>However, sourceforge is doing this to make money. What business owner with any common sense hears customers complaining about them and tells them it's rude? If customers complain about your service, you empathize with them and find out what you can do to improve.<p>Whatever respect for sourceforge I had just went away. You can't just ignore customer complaints because you're open source.

I haven't posted anything bad about sourceforge, had missed the controversy they referred to. I totally agree with everything the author said (and thought she said it very well). However, I have to admit that when I saw the title of the article and the domain name (before I read the article) I could feel myself gearing up to get angry at sourceforge and defend github.<p>I can totally relate to people who root for one technology to win and trash another, because I totally root for technologies all the time. I get really annoyed when a "bad" technology comes out with a good feature I wish the technology I was rooting for had. Which is kind of insane when I think about it. This post was a good reminder about how irrational that rooting and fanboyism is. I will have to be more mindful of that stuff, because it really makes me blind sometimes.

While I agree the hate is unnecessary, calling out random Twitter users in a company blog post isn't very classy. It comes across as a petty attempt at revenge.

A note to all startups: this is not how you should respond to brand criticism. SF.net and GitHub are in competition, and a heartfelt blog post does not make your product better. Spend your time iterating, and make something that is actually better for your customers. GNOME didn't get to the point it's at today by saying "KDE is fine, but GNOME is open source too! Same team!"

I always smile a little bit when I see the force of creative destruction. Kudos to the guys at github who ignored the threat of google and built a business that is profitable and beating established incumbents.<p>I am sure the folks at sourceforge have their hearts in the right place, but a tarnished brand is a tarnished brand. They could launch a better product than github tomorrow, but I'll always have the frustration of trying to use wget on SF in the back of my mind.

Sourceforge had his time. As MySpace had his time, too. They where cool a few years ago and where the best thing that could happen to the internet, but we moved away from those for better solutions. Solutions that weren't possible without those sites. I am very thankfull that Sourceforge existed. I hosted my first projects there, too.<p>Good bye and please stop crying like a baby about the hate you are getting. You have two options: make your site as easy to use as github or continue dying. Crying publicly is none of those :) .

Overly defensive. The existence of haters on Twitter doesn't merit a blog post.

We're definitely in agreement at GitHub. This industry, like every other industry, isn't a zero-sum game; plenty of growth to be had for everyone. This is a nice post, and it's been fun seeing the stuff SF has been building in the last year or so in particular.

Honestly, I think that SourceForge used to be <i>easier</i> to use than it is now. When it had its old interface circa (2002-2005 ish) I could find the information and do the tasks I wanted to do. It is difficult for me to find /anything/ on SourceForge these days, when I am forced to use it at all.<p>SourceForge was (and perhaps is) a great place for open source. I don't think it was a "lazy monopoly" or even a "monopoly" at all. There were always alternatives. Always other places one could go to host code and share code. When it was the most popular site, it was the best site. Now it is simply not the best site. I am super productive on Github, and unless something 5x better comes along I don't think I will move off of Github.

There is definitely a social scene in geekdom now with its own zeitgeist that is independent of underlying intellectual factors. Using the terms from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, geeks used to inhabit just the intellectual plane (although like any gathering of people, there will be some social aspects to their behavior).<p>Nowadays, with so many self-promotion and socialization tools out there (and which capture so much of our attention), geekdom is as much a social phenomenon as an intellectual one.

I'm firmly with the haters on this one.<p>They chose to ignore their community for the better part of a decade. And now that their ad-revenue declines they're suddenly "on our side"?<p>As far as I am concerned they can take their whiny blog-post and shove it.

Here's a reason for SourceForge hate. At least as of a couple weeks ago, when you go to download a file, you are shown a survey (as a sort of ad). There is no indication that the survey is optional, and initially I thought it was required. If you ignore the survey you can still download the file, and I was able to figure that out eventually. A less experienced user wouldn't be so lucky, thinking that the survey is required, thus revealing personal or business information that they shouldn't have to.

Yes, SourceForge sat on their "monopoly" and did not innovate. Yes, they got complacent. But they were so ahead of their time! If I remember correctly, SourceForge even used to offer a compiler farm so you could try to compile your library/program under different environments.<p>Their mistakes benefited to all new services and competitors. If GitHub had been the first to offer this kind of service, they may have committed some of SF mistakes.

Personally I don't get why there's so much negativity. I love GitHub just as much as the next guy, but I don't see why that makes SourceForge insignificant or irrelevant. Haters gonna hate, I guess :(

There are some aspects that SF still do a lot better than the competition on. Nobody is even close to competing with the speed and breadth of their mirrors.

I wonder why neither the original link nor this SF blog post mention BitBucket - I think they give a pretty good, GitHub-like experience, just with Mercurial. Both are definitely more pleasant to use than SF

You want code examples to learn, you want people to talk to as developers, etc search github..<p>SF is of the same banal cabal as java.net who make the mistake that they own the community. Github assumes that they must earn their role in the community..big effing difference!

Very well said.