Shorewall seems to use git for version control, in which case it doesn't really matter to the solo developer where the public repo is hosted. He's probably still on sourceforge because he doesn't want to give up nearly 20 years of messages he exchanged with his users. You can't migrate that to Github, can you?
If anyone adopts the project as their own, though, I hope they move to a platform where it's easier for others to contribute.
> With all due respect, maybe he would have had better luck moving the community to another site
I think you're missing the point of his announcement and nowhere has Tom complained about visibility, contributor pool etc. The maintainer is in his 70's and likely kinda done with the project and fancies a change of pace, as evidenced by:
"I am now departing on an extended trip to visit some of the places in the world that I have always dreamed of seeing."
Not all projects need to level up to GitHub and the unwashed masses blasting you with issues and pull requests. SourceForge, despite its past transgressions, likely suited his cadence of work.
I feel the same. When looking into some new linux distros out of curiosity, I'm noticing a trend that these new devs are putting it on source forge and immediately I am "turned off." Its not rampant but it has happened enough for me to hope this isn't going to be an escalating practice.
github certainly has its problems (feature bloat), but gitlab and bitbucket are options - as well as the new sourcehut
i have tried sourceforge a few times over the years and its just absolute garbage - from the forums to the issues to the source code - the only parts thats worth a damn is the binary downloads - and you can you bintray or a number of other places for that
any project that uses sourceforge for ANYTHING these days - even just docs - i dont touch unless i absolutely have to.