loganabbott

Publishing wrong information is wrong.

That is correct. We informed SF Conservancy about this but they are so far unwilling to correct it.

SourceForge CEO here. The first paragraph of this article is wrong. SourceForge has been built on Apache Allura since 2011. https://allura.apache.org

Most people have gotten the message that things have changed at SourceForge. We bought it to redeem the name and protect free open source software.

We're a small independently owned private company, and not a single person responsible for those decisions made years ago is still involved with the company. It's been over 3 years since we bought SourceForge and we reversed all the bad decisions on day 1 and never looked back. We still support Mercurial https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/documentation/Mercurial/#pub...

SourceForge still supports Mercurial https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/documentation/Mercurial/#pub...

Nope it's still free and has always been free. And it's built on Apache Allura which is open source.

Huh? Still completely free

Hi, president of SourceForge here. Glad this is trending, albeit a few months later. These articles seem to trend on HN every few months, with many people not realizing SourceForge changed ownership in 2016 and that the new team's been working hard on improving.

To be clear, we had nothing to do with the bundled adware decisions of 2015, and when we took over in 2016, the first thing we did was remove the bundled adware, as well as institute malware scans for every project on the site.

We're working hard to restore trust, so if we win some of you back that would be cool. However, we're just focused on doing right by our million daily users.

We lost a few hours of commits and notified everyone affected. That's it.

FYI the SourceForge version of FileZilla is clean, and has been since 2016. The official FileZilla installer has been doing this for some time now though. In case people don’t know, a lot has changed at SourceForge since my company acquired them in 2016. All projects are scanned for malware. We covered the improvements again here https://sourceforge.net/blog/brief-history-sourceforge-look-...

This blog post is not accurate at all.

FYI the SourceForge version of FileZilla is clean, and has been since 2016. The official FileZilla installer has been doing this for some time now though. In case people don’t know, a lot has changed at SourceForge since my company acquired them in 2016. All projects are scanned for malware. We covered the improvements again here https://sourceforge.net/blog/brief-history-sourceforge-look-...

Thanks for the input. I am not trying to be insulting to anyone here. If it came off that way, I apologize. I am just, maybe too frustratingly, trying to get the point across that we are not the same as the previous owners. I understand why the name might confuse people though.

My point was not to be insulting, it was to draw attention to the fact that I don't know this person, just like most people don't know what's going on behind the scenes at SourceForge, or just how healthy we are as a company.

Sorry if my comments rubbed you the wrong way, but it's a bit frustrating when these threads pop up weekly, and people feel like it's open license to attack me and my company. We really are doing our best to make SourceForge a trusted destination, but still get the flack as if we were the previous ownership.

Well I do appreciate the feedback and valid questions. I will be putting some thought into it.

I'm not frustrated, but these threads show up on HN almost weekly now, with armchair quarterbacks who really are not current on the state of open source opining ill informed opinions. They even know we are new owners who immediately killed all the bad stuff, and still blame us. I cared about SourceForge, so I bought it and removed DevShare, and still get the blame. People know that we having nothing to do with the old owners, but recreational online outrage is fun, so they continue to blame us for saving it. Cognitive dissonance is en vogue right now. I guess if someone's lonely Sunday night is made better by shitting on the people who did everything in their power to save SourceForge, then go for it. I just think people's time can be used better.

Thanks. I appreciate it.

I don't think "attacking" means what you think it means. Why do you keep posting the same comment over and over?

Man, the definition of the word "attack" has really changed recently.

Our agenda was removing bundled adware and improving user experience. Mystery solved.

Thanks. Yep we killed the bundled adware and fake download buttons on DAY ONE. Nice to hear that at least some people understand that.

Thank you for being reasonable

That just tells me your breadth of knowledge of the open source landscape is limited. You can scroll down this thread to see plenty of big projects still at SourceForge.

That doesn't really make any sense today though.

Other than these uninformed HN threads, most people can distinguish between the owners that did the bad stuff, and the owners that bought it specifically to undo the bad stuff.

No malware issues since 2016 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/under...

My company had nothing to do with it, but it's worth noting you're one of the few people who actually remembers the actual non-revisionist history.

Why would you feel bad for us? We removed the malpractices right away, became profitable, improved the experience for over a million daily users, and are growing at a rate not seen since before the problems. I'd say we have the opposite of a problem. A few random armchair quarterbacks on Hackers News aren't gonna get us down.