This was so mind-boggling even at the time that SourceForge thought it could leverage its market position to force adware and other nonsense upon its users and get away with it, which itself the last straw in a string of other abuses they subjected users to on the website. It is also so arrogant and presumptive to think that the developers, who's projects were hosted here, would put up with their distribution platform bundling junk with their software.

This was a mortal sin for them, and rightfully so, whereby it became impossible to recover the damage to their reputation. Like, what were they thinking? Did they know they were doomed and just wanted one final ad sale? It’s just an egregious abuse of whatever dwindling power they had which permanently destroyed what little trust that the developers had for them - the same group of people that provided the only real value (for free, even) that SourceForge held.

> This was so mind-boggling even at the time that SourceForge thought ...

They'd been recently bought by a shitty company called DICE that also owned ummm... CNet or Download.com, or some other similar place with lots of downloads for Windows users:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice.com

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Adware_controversy

That company already served ~malware~ sorry "bundled third party offers" with their windows downloads, and figured they'd be able to copy-n-paste that approach to popular OSS downloads.

That's not how it played out however, as some of us actually give a shit about things like that. ;)

It was a funny and gross moment shortly after the corporation I was working at had acquired CNet where every IT department was notified by corporate IT that download.com was not a reliable site and should _never_ be used to download software into the company.

Heh, so they bought CNet then suddenly it was banned and traffic dropped off a cliff or something?

That's the company that bought Slashdot isn't it?

Yup.

/. is a faint shadow of what they once were.

TBF, it wasn't just Dice. At that time, CNN and Yahoo (I think) nuked their trollgard- er, comments, and they all went to slashdot. It became the place to go, for top-quality Nazi ASCII art.

Most likely management wanted more monetization and didn't listen to anyone who pushed back and said that bundling adware was a bad idea.

Seriously.

> We will bundle adware with your downloads.

I guess I can’t download using your download site anymore?

> surprised_pikachu.jpg

In the mad, wild world of 2015, SourceForge, once the high priest of open-source sanctuaries, turned to the dark arts, conjuring a storm of controversy that would rattle its sacred halls. This wasn’t your grandma's repository anymore; it became a bizarre bazaar, peddling adware and malware alongside its trove of treasures, much to the horror of its loyal acolytes. They were slipping digital demons into downloads, especially those forsaken projects left to gather dust in the corners of the internet, turning a once-hallowed ground into a haunted house.

Enter the DevShare program, a Faustian bargain if there ever was one. It whispered sweet nothings into the ears of developers, promising them a slice of the pie if they let these third-party gremlins hitch a ride with their creations. But here’s the twist – SourceForge, in a move that would make Machiavelli blush, didn’t always wait for a nod of approval. They shadow-copied projects, dolled them up with their unwanted baggage, and pushed them onto the unsuspecting masses as the real deal.

Who masterminded this descent into madness? The suits at SourceForge under the banner of Dice Holdings, who else? Names weren’t named, but the open-source warriors and keyboard knights didn’t need a who to channel their fury at the sacrilege committed against their digital Eden.

But as the adage goes, "It's always darkest before the dawn," and so it was for SourceForge. By 2016, under the new flag of BIZX, LLC, a wind of change blew through its realm. The DevShare program, that deal with the devil, was slain, laid to rest in the hopes of resurrecting the platform's lost glory. The new overlords vowed a return to the old ways, a purge of the parasitic practices, aiming to restore faith in the digital congregation and bring back the prodigal programmers.

SourceForge’s saga is a testament to the eternal battle for the soul of the internet, a reminder that even in the digital age, the pen (or the code) is mightier than the sword (or the adware).

prodigal means wasteful. otherwise, beautiful.

The word "prodigal" does indeed primarily mean spending money or resources freely and recklessly; wastefully extravagant. However, it can also be used more broadly to describe someone who is lavishly generous; giving profusely or excessively. The term originates from the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son, where "prodigal" refers to the wayward son's lavish and wasteful spending.

Over time, the nuances of the word "prodigal" have expanded, and it can now be used in a variety of contexts to describe any sort of excessive or wasteful behavior, not just financial. Additionally, it can sometimes be used in a positive light, emphasizing generosity and abundance rather than waste.

I liked that too, what was the prompt?

To be fair to them there are still a few projects which are still hosted on SF, in some cases it's the only place you can find specific legacy projects.

So if their calculation was that all of open source would stay on their platform with them adding malware, they were wrong. But if the calculation was that a long tail of random small and semi-orphaned projects would stay there after the big popular projects had all migrated, providing them with essentially free revenue for a very long time, they were kind of right.

And their browse function is actually useful, unlike Github's (which doesn't have any, as i recall).

IIRC when Google Code was announced to be closing, the Microsoft equivalent (CodePlex) was the next location a lot of projects moved to. It had a decent UI and supported Mercurial in addition to Git.

When MS also announced they were closing that and offering a tool to migrate to GitHub, was when GitHub (and Git) truly became the biggest remaining option.

The other aspect of SourceForge's decline was that they doubled down on the sketchy site feeling right as acceptance of such sites was on the decline, the likes of mediafire, zippyshare etc were being replaced with cloud storage providers and download aggregators were losing popularity (in part due to also becoming very sketchy and prone to pushing malware). They might've been able to get away with it a few years earlier. I remember that back then it wasn't a huge deal to follow a mediafire download link from somewhere that seemed reliable enough, whereas nowadays it'd be an immediate red flag due to the abundance of more legitimate seeming file sharing options.

People used Codeplex? I thought it was just this crazy halfstep Sam Ramji convinced MS to take, leading them to open source. When it launched, Codeplex was supposed to be a source code museum, where you could see the code but not reuse it. Crazy I know, but it was what MS was comfortable with at the time, and a few years later they opened .NET. Codeplex was like an experiment to get MS to touch open source code and feel comfortable with it at a legal level, not a replacement for Sourceforge...

Around those times I was mostly a .NET kid and most of the .NET projects I remember looking at were on CodePlex, so maybe my perspective is a little distorted.

Your perspective is in my experience not distorted. Programming is not a unique culture, but divided into multiple subcultures. Projects that were nearer to the .NET or Windows programming culture indeed often chose CodePlex instead of GitHub while there was a choice.

My recollection is that google code had been dead for a number of years when somebody remembered it was still a thing and then shut it off in 2016.

Google was already using GitHub ("To meet developers where they are, we ourselves migrated nearly a thousand of our own open source projects from Google Code to GitHub.") and added an "export to GiHub" button on google code. Maybe if you were .net you went to codeplex but most everyone else (including Google) went to GitHub, if they weren't already there.

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2015/03/farewell-to-google...

I used Google code. Then it announced it's closure either Google code or GitHub provided tools to import projects in to GitHub. I can't remember which. But I did that.

>IIRC when Google Code was announced to be closing

That happened in 2015. Everyone was already on GitHub by then. GitHub had surpassed in usage Sourceforge, Code, and CodePlex from 2011. Also CodePlex didn't had Git support until 2012.

GitHub won well before because git was superior to existing open source SCM solutions and GitHub created Pull Requests which made forking and contributing code back from your fork trivial.

The only real question at the time was whether Git or Mercurial (or for a brief period of time Bazaar if I remember correctly). While Mercurial itself was clearly superior to Git, it had no equivalent to GitHub.

If GitHub had chosen to build their workflows on Mercurial instead we would likely be talking about HgHub right now instead.

> While Mercurial itself was clearly superior to Git, it had no equivalent to GitHub.

There existed BitBucket (it still exists, but as far as I am aware they switched to offering Git hosting).

Also their site was fill with intrusive ads, the repo browser was crap. GitHub was fast, no ads, markdown rendering and a decent repo browser.

Also the main advantage of git was local copies, so the source code was more safe. And speed SVN was slow for large repos. At my first place we had an SVN server in the server room, when it's hard drive crashed no one could work for a day :)

Still people hated git first because it was much more complicated with it's branches, PRs etc

Yes, your first paragraph is the big standout in my memory. GitHub and Google Code were clean, uncluttered, and focused in a way that SourceForge was very much not. Almost what Google was to Excite, Lycos, etc in the early 2000s.

What were Google's reasons for shutting down Code?

Same as their reason for shutting down all their other projects. They only ever existed as a distraction for their underemployed workforce and as part of the PR that they have a mission other than pulling cash out of their personal-data-monetising advertising monopoly, forever.

The bundling thing happened after Sourceforge was already well in decline, 2013, which was five years after GitHub launched. Google Code shutdown was announced 2015. IIRC Sourceforge was becoming less relevant because it hadn’t introduced git support, and GitHub answered that demand. By the time it added it, it was too late.

Bundling adware with software was not the death knell for Sourceforge, it was a death rattle - though the corpse is livelier than I’d have thought ten-plus years later.

Hm, it feels the adware was a bit later, or rather I should be surprised how early sourceforge fell into irrelevance in my circles. When it made the news I was pretty much just shrugging "well nobody's using that anymore anyways"

It's just one of the examples where somebody came along offering pretty much the same thing but just with a different focus (code/collab), and arguably also relevant a cleaner, fresher look.

It's baffling in retrospect how Google couldn't recognize the strategic opportunity of Google Code.

That's how I remember it too, with the additions that they also did a bunch of additional shit like show early-stage surveillance ads, and sign you up for unwanted mail lists by default, and more, but all less-awful than the installation of unwanted spamware).

My dad runs his company accounting on GnuCash, and I sometimes help him set up a computer, and it is always startling that SourceForge even exists. (It's still the official download[1].)

[1]: https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/

P.S. I think you meant "death knell" but it's all good, we all understood. :)

Death knell is the killing blow (or harbinger of?)

Death rattle refers to a rattling noise produced in the lungs with one's dying breaths.

Both applicable, death rattle is a little bit more appropriate though, because it's an action that sourceforge took.

Literally, a death knell is a bell rung (esp by a church) to indicate someone has died. Figuratively it's an event that signals an end to something.

as is a death toll the ringing of a bell signifying death.

> P.S. I think you meant "death knell" but it's all good, we all understood. :)

You are correct, I garbled it with "[death] bell toll" (specifically thinking of "for whom the bell tolls.")

Sourceforge was already long over in mindshare by that point, it basically just convinced most of the few remaining holdouts at that point. (With a few notable exceptions, like FileZilla)

I kept reading the article waiting for this lede but it never came. That's what ultimately left a sour taste in my mouth back in the SourceForge days.

This is how I remembered it as well.

Kind of preferred Google Code over GitHub for a while. Or at least until it had enough functionality and/or tools to support it.

Almost feels like it's time again for a shift...but it will probably be a while

It would be good if they gitlab and gitea standardised some features such as how to track issues in a repo, to make a baseline of portability available. Then they can say migrate to one of us from GitHub using this special tool, and then you'll have a nice portable repo from then on.

That might help a little with the transition, ready for when MS does one of their crazy moves and people suddenly want to switch.

We are in that phase we're non ms incompatible features will be added to mgit and the flesh eating plant slowly closes shut.

Honestly it’s been time for a shift ever since they were bought by Microsoft…

Yeah doesn't something this important need lots of money and accountability behind it so if sh@t hits the fan, its their burden and not an underfunded team. Like look at the XZ thing, things can get really serious really quick. I am not saying its a perfect situation but Github actions and the enterprise features are actually really good and I don't understand how any team smaller than the big 3 could handle the amount of data/users/traffic/importance that Github has become. Just an opinion ..

Also lots of people were using other VCSes like Mercurial and SVN. Representative of the times is eg this blog post about Mercurial on Google Code http://blog.dreasgrech.com/2010/07/managing-google-code-proj...

(Well, lots of people still are, but Git usage grew quite fast)

Yep, that's when I quit downloading from SourceForge as well

IIRC, Sourceforge's reputation was being tarnished even before the malware. Sourceforge had some kind of data loss incident, whereupon open source developers I knew started referring to it as "Sourceforget".

Later, one day someone said in a group of Linux developers, "So, Linus made a version control system...", kinda amused. I didn't know whether Torvalds was actually going to use it for Linux, and didn't even consider that it might be adopted by pretty much all software developers of any kind.

It was even named "git", like it was aggressively trying to be unmarketable.

But at some point, GitHub emerged, and grew a very favorable reputation. Then they sold out.

> Then they sold out.

Ah, finally someone recollects the original.

People look at me funny when I tell them it wasn't an Microsoft creation.

Christ I am old

"People"?

Jeez man, everyone knows that most Microsoft products with any success are acquisitions. In the cases of Windows NT and C#, they just bought the designers.

It is mind boggling that Google has given up on so many potential businesses like code because they didn’t think the market was big enough.

A few years ago I recall the new CEO sort of relaunched source forge on hacker news and seemed very keen to listen to feedback. I wonder what ever happened with that.

For me (I used to use SF), it was as simple as it took SF years to adopt Git, and I liked Git a lot more than SVN.

At the time, GH was pretty much the best expression of hosted Git out there.

Yes, I didn't remember a continuum between SF and GitHub but the obvious demise of SF et al (Greshmeat, Slashdot, etc).

Including those events would certainly change the picture. I don't like how the article implies that all this was a result of GitHub founders being smart rather than SourceForge misplaying their hand. The article smacks of the irrational worship of successful founders that's so common.

In reality, I think there was (and still is, albeit small) market for alternative hosting, and there definitely were niches where SourceForge was better at (downloading binaries, for example). If SourceForge didn't misplay their hand, it's entirely possible Github won't have the near monopoly on open source hosting they have now.

The second VA Linux sold off it's hardware division, and definitely after co-founder Larry Augustins departure, the die was cast.

The company, and Sourceforge's leadership, lost all tethering to the community that fostered them, and the firm got passed around from buyer to buyer like a blunt at a Phish concert.