[giantrobot]

A small SourceForge retrospective for those not around at the time:

This post's overview of contributing to Open Source is largely correct. You'd get the source tarball for a project, make some changes, and then e-mail the author/maintainer witch a patch. Despite the post's claim Open Source existed long before 1998.

Rarely did Internet randos have any access to a project's VCS. A lot of "projects" (really just a program written by a single person) didn't even have meaningful VCS, running CVS or RVS were skills unto themselves. There was also the issue that a lot of Open Source was written by students and hosted on school servers or an old Linux box in a dorm.

SourceForge came along riding the first Internet bubble. They let a lot of small FOSS projects go legit by giving them a project homepage without a .edu domain or tilde in it. They also got a managed VCS (CVS at first then Subversion later) and contact e-Mail addresses, forums, and other bits that made the lives of Linux distro and BSD ports maintainers much easier. They also had a number of mirror sites which enabled a level of high availability most projects could never have had previously.

Then SourceForge's enshitification began as bubble money ran out. The free tier of features was decreased and then they started bundling AdWare into Windows installers. SourceForge would literally repackage a Windows installer to install the FOSS application and some bullshit AdWare, IIRC a browser toolbar was a major one.

As the officially upstream source for FOSS projects bundled for package managers the AdWare wasn't much of a problem. But SourceForge was the distribution channel for a significant amount of Windows FOSS apps like VLC, MirandaIM, and a bunch of P2P apps which were impacted by the AdWare bundling at various points.

A GitHub founder patting themselves on the back for the success of GitHub is sort of funny because GitHub followed a similar track to SourceForge but got bought by Microsoft instead of a company coasting on VC money. I can easily imagine a world where an independent GitHub enshittified had they not been bought by a money fountain.

[samatman]

> Open Source existed long before 1998

It did not. Free software did. The term "open source" was coined by Christine Peterson at a meeting in January of 1998, as Netscape was contemplating releasing their source code as free software. The Open Source Initiative was founded a month later, and forked the Debian Free Software Guidelines, written by one of the OSI founders, Bruce Perens. This was a deliberate marketing exercise, both to avoid the unfortunate "as in beer" connotations of free software, and to distance the concept from the FSF and Richard Stallman.

All of this is well documented.

[account42]

Does something only exist once it is named? Free software is also open source software, even if that name was only coined later on.

[samatman]

We don't have to get philosophical about it, this is what the Fine Article says:

> Most of you kids probably don’t remember a time where there weren’t millions of open source projects around, but the phrase was only coined in 1998.

100% and unambiguously true.

[giantrobot]

In 1998 there definitely weren't millions of open source projects. Debian 1.3.1 (released in 1997[0]) had over two thousand packages. I pick Debian here because they only packaged software with unambiguously Open licenses. That's just packages shipped by Debian and not a full accounting of all open source software packages available in 1997. I'm sure some Walnut Creek CDs had a bunch more tarballs with more ambiguous licensing.

Open source software existed before 1998. I don't know why you're trying to quibble about the exact branding, just because the Open Source Software term wasn't coined until a certain date doesn't mean that is the start of all software with open licenses or people publicly releasing the source of their software. The GPL, MIT, and BSD licenses are all from the 80s.

[0] https://www.debian.org/News/1997/19970708

[samatman]

I'm not the one quibbling here. You are.

You said this:

> Despite the post's claim Open Source existed long before 1998.

I've illustrated two things: it is not true that the term "open source" existed before 1998, and, the Fine Article's claim is, to quote it again:

> Most of you kids probably don’t remember a time where there weren’t millions of open source projects around, but the phrase was only coined in 1998.

That is, it is explicitly a claim about the phrase, meaning no possible interpretation of your expressed contradiction of the article can be correct.

All of your points could have been made without incorrectly stating that the author was wrong. In that case I would have upvoted and moved on.

[PaulHoule]

I agree w/ the analysis in the article and yours. “Good taste” for them must have been influenced by “let’s not be SourceForge”.

Part of the enshittification story is the tragedy of the non-profitable site that has a large user base. Here is a recent example

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41463734

Potentially investments in a site could have huge leverage because of the existing user base.

I (and most of my team) lost our jobs at one of the most well-loved open accessing publishing sites in the world because of a complex chain of events that was rooted in the site not having a sustainable funding source despite the fact that it was fantastically cheap to run if you divided the budget by the number of daily users. Fortunately they figured it all out and the site is still here and if you work in physics, math or cs you probably used it today.

Still it was painful to see “new shiny” projects that had 4x the funding but 1% the user count at most, or to estimate we could save users $500M a year with a $500k budget.

Thus you can overthrow SourceForge but cannot overthrow something profitable and terrible such as Facebook, Match.com or the “blob” of review sites that dominate Google, see

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41488857

[jakub_g]

> GitHub followed a similar track to SourceForge

Can you provide an example?

[giantrobot]

GitHub offered a better experience than the existing offerings. They then scaled massively to the point where it was expensive to run without a lot of good options for monetization. Thankfully for GitHub they got bought by Microsoft and not say Verizon or GameStop (which owns the corpse of SourceForge for unfathomable reasons).

GitHub could have easily enshittified in an effort to make money had they not been bought by someone with deep pockets.

[rascul]

I thought GameStop sold SourceForge off over a decade ago and that it has changed hands a couple times since.

[progmetaldev]

GitHub was not on the same track as SourceForge, and I would hazard they were in a completely different world than then one SourceForge developed in. For instance, GitHub is far less likely to host an executable for any software, which is where you're going to get bundled installers with AdWare or malware. I know that GitHub allows installers to be uploaded, but if we're going to compare the time period before Microsoft purchased GitHub, I really don't think this is fair. I understand the history of not trusting Microsoft, and even as someone who is deeply involved in using GitHub and Microsoft software and features, can understand a level of distrust. Everything you said about SourceForge is correct, so I don't mean to put down your entire comment here.

I believe GitHub's underlying use of the Git SCM, as well as the interface that allowed web users to look at "pull requests" as a concept was the real value in GitHub, far before hosting binaries or attracting the attention of Microsoft. The attraction to Microsoft was the ability to pull in the growing network of git users, the popularity of GitHub to a growing number of developers, and the ability to integrate the service into their developer offerings (this was the key that would have made the other two "positives" worthless to them).

I think any tool or technology you should have an "out", in case another corporation/company takes over and doesn't align with your values. Being stuck on SourceForge, Google Code, GitHub, Bitbucket, etc. is a recipe to lock yourself into being put down to pasture because you couldn't adapt and realize that there is a huge world out there, and tools and tech come and go. Always have something as an alternative for whatever you do, because things change too quickly, plus you get another point of view with solving problems (if that's your thing, and you aren't just developing for the money, which is fine if you can admit it to yourself). The fact that you are able to dive back into time with SourceForge tells me you are one of those people that have been into technology since pre-dot com bust, but probably got burned by Microsoft in some form. I'm not defending Microsoft for their past practices, only coming at this from what they have done with GitHub to this point. Hopefully I'm not wrong, but I do have a plan in place in case I am, and I think that's the most important thing in software.

[giantrobot]

I don't think GitHub's situation is completely analogous to SourceForge. You're right that GitHub doesn't have a huge moat by virtue of the way git works. I think Microsoft realizes that, no one necessarily loves GitHub so much they'd not jump ship if GitHub became too user hostile.

To be clear I'm not trying to be down on GitHub here. They made a good product and a very good alternative to SourceForge. I think they just got lucky getting bought by Microsoft when they did. By 2018 I think they'd gotten to the point where their costs would have required to start chasing revenue.