[cruffle_duffle]

"shadow of its former self"

Was there ever a point in time where it wasn't something that basically sucked? For some reason there are still some widely used ham radio packages that are hosted on sourceforge and it annoys me greatly. When you click the big green "Download" for the project you get.... .... a dll file. Why? Because the actual release artifact is some other zip file and for some reason it doesn't deserve the "Big Green Download" button.

SF has always been this bad. Their core data model just doesn't jive with how people actually interact with open source projects.

... and for that matter didn't they stir up some controversy a long while ago for tampering with project artifacts and adding extra "stuff" in them? (spyware / nagware / **ware?)

[mnau]

Yes, they were cool once upon a time. It the place to be, you didn't have to host your own CVS without charge (no git back then, hell, even SVN was released few years after SF). It was like geocities.

It looks almopst impossible today, but launching a service was really hard and expensive back then. It cost a lot of money/effort in just software. All that stuff you can just download and it actually works? No way man, didn't exist yet.

That is why LAMP stack was so great back then, it was free, working and reasonably low-maintenence and super easy to set-up.

[progmetaldev]

Yes, they used to be great for open source projects. They did get wrapped up in controversy where another company took over and were including other software in the installers, if you weren't careful to uncheck the optional (and unrelated) software. There is still great software hosted there, like FileZilla if you use a Windows environment. FileZilla did have the optional software installs for about a year or so, but as long as you paid attention, it was easy to get around (you just had to pay attention, but that's not an excuse for what they did).

[toast0]

> Was there ever a point in time where it wasn't something that basically sucked?

Yeah, when it launched it was cool and hip. Free public CVS server to host your open source cool project was cool. Probably went downhill as the ad market fell apart post dot-com, and the only way to get revenue was big green download buttons.

[account42]

It's been a while since I bothered with SF but AFAIR the maintainer can select which file is the default download that you get through the big button.