[astrodust]

SourceForge wasn't SourceForge back then, it was other things that were later aggregated into it. I've been on the internet before there were browsers, so I know my history.

Freshmeat was never a spectacular platform, but it was the de-facto open-source distribution center at the time. It played an important role in that environment, but was more of a distribution channel than a collaboration tool.

Today SourceForge is the GeoCities of source hosting. It has almost no redeeming features.

[nitrogen]

SourceForge may have started as something else, but it was already SourceForge by 2000. Check out my account, created January of 2000: http://sourceforge.net/users/nitrogen

It's not my intention to try to one up others with my four-digit UID. All I'm saying is, I was there, I was heavily involved in Open Source at the time, and SourceForge was critical.

Edit to add: Geocities was pretty important to the development of the web, too. Part of me prefers the days when everyone made their own eye-gouging web site instead of relying on Facebook. There was a much more eclectic selection of content available back then.

[count]

> There was a much more eclectic selection of content available back then.

Really? On Geocities and the web in the 90s?

Just because you stopped looking for new content and 'web rings' fell out of style, doesn't mean it all went away and the only thing on the Internet is now Facebook. There are nearly 200M active websites on the Internet, with 55M of those alone being Wordpress sites (which I'd suggest is in competition with Tumblr, et. al to inherit the 'geocities' throne). In 2000, there weren't even 50M individual websites.

I think you might be viewing history through some rose-colored glasses, open source or otherwise.

I do agree that SF.net (and /.) played a central role in Open Source, and was fantastic at the time. It's a well worn turd now, compared to it's younger, more nimble competition.

It does have the benefit that it only (afaik) hosts OSS though - as was mentioned the other day, there are thousands of projects where the code is available on github, but there's no license allowing any form of derivative or other use.

[xtracto]

I remember the early 90s web being full of electronic DIY pages with very interesting projects and tutorials.

Nowadays, it is kind of hard to find good sites specialized in that which are free.

Oh, and back then there we did not need to install adblock plus to make navigating the web a bearable experience.