The changes are designed to re-establish devs’ trust in SourceForge.
Yeah, good luck with that ...
SourceForge wants tighter ties with other code repositories following Microsoft’s decision to shutter CodePlex. President Logan Abbott has said he’ll seek tighter integration between SourceForge’s tools and those of others – including giant rival GitHub. Abbot was speaking after Microsoft announced the closure of its open- …
Yep, that't the one. Your project may be associated with distributing malware...
It's the same one that has the horrible confusing web interface. Surely it too needs taking behind the shed and shooting too..
GitHub/Bitbucket are all you need in reality. (BitBucket allows private closed source for free and has JIRA and Build pipelines, Github doesn't)
Was,
Luckily it didn't work and the new owner killed that. Rebuilding trust is a long, long effort, though.
Still wonder, anyway, how many people who loather - rightly - MS monopoly, are fully ready to accept other monopolies like Google or GitHub.
I believe it's a good thing competition is active in this sector too. Especially since SourceForge wasn't built on a single VCS backend. Today Git is still the hot one, but in a few years there could be a new fashionable toy...
"Still wonder, anyway, how many people who loather - rightly - MS monopoly, are fully ready to accept other monopolies like Google or GitHub."
GitHub is a particularly delicious irony, given where git came from in the first place.
I'm always saddened and amazed to find out how many people don't know this, though.
(If you're one of them: look up "Bitkeeper".)
SourceForge was bundling installers with certain projects in 2015 (before my company acquired SourceForge). The first thing we did upon acquiring SourceForge in 2016 was eliminated all bundled installers immediately. After that we instituted malware scans on all projects and https downloads to ensure the downloads were secure.
Some more info here: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/under-new-management-sourceforge-moves-to-put-badness-in-past/
and a Reddit AMA I did here: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_of_sourceforge_since_its_acquisition_in/
> before my company acquired SourceForge
Shortly after that, your company sent a "Fair processing notice - Data protection Act 1998" to its users (including an old account of mine).
At the end of that, it included this text:
You can ask us to remove all your account data, stop processing your personal data and to stop contacting you for marketing purposes at any time.
* For SourceForge.net, please contact us at sfnet_ops@slashdotmedia.com
* For Slashdot, please contact us at privacy@slashdot.org
* For FreeCode, please contact us at freecode-privacy@slashdotmedia.com
* For SlashdotMedia.com, please contact us at sfnet_ops@slashdotmedia.com
As directed there, several times I emailed "sfnet_ops@slashdotmedia.com". Not once, ever has anyone responded.
So, frankly... (at least this far) your company doesn't seem any better than the previous owner.
Nothing in life is free - someone has to pay for the repo. There are three business models:
1. It is free for users, who are not customers, but they are the product being sold. Sourceforge (and Facebook etc.)
2. A proportion of users pay for it for it, with a limited, free version to hook paying customers into it. GitHub funds itself through its premium repo services?
3. As an advertising strategy, in the same way that companies sponsor sports teams and charity events. Unfortunately there is no kudos from hosting code repos any more, so these are dying. Google code, Codeplex
Nobody mentioned gitlab yet - if you don't trust any of the big boys you can host it yourself. And there's still trac, redmine etc.
Given that there are also multiple source control backends (git, svn, hg) the ecosystem seems pretty healthy to me.
Sourceforge is the Altavista of this party: an early trailblazer but one whose time has long since been and gone. It clings on because some projects still use it for mailing lists (which github doesn't provide).
GitLab is ok, but it's a bit of a PITA to manage and seems to have a bad case of creeping featureitis.
For people wanting a GitHub-like web interface, git backend, and low resource usage, Gitea (forked from Gogs) is probably a better choice: https://gitea.io