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by baldfat 4039 days ago
The only issue is that Sourceforge made nice binaries available. Most people have no idea how to use git and/or build their own binaries.
4 comments

The official win32 gimp installers were not made by sourceforge, but by the GIMP contributor now locked out of managing the relevant sourceforge account. The same win32 installers that used to be provided on sourceforge are now provided from gimp.org directly http://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.8/windows/ the problem is the nice binaries being replaced by sourceforge made installers that also install adware.
Even before they started adding malware installers, downloads redirected through an extra ad page (and interfered with curl, wget, etc).
SourceForge has worked with wget, NSIS's inetc, etc for at least the last 10 years. We've been using it with PortableApps.com.
wget at least isn't affected, as long as you copy the link from the files page (the one that normally displays ads and a countdown timer in browser - it'll download the file directly with wget, since they apparently do user-agent sniffing).
GitHub supports releases w/ binary attachments[0]. I think the only thing they're missing at this point is shell access.

[0] https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software

What does the SourceForge shell access get you? If it's only the ability to edit your website and maybe your code (and not install, compile, etc. things), is it valuable in a world with git-push-to-deploy and with web-based editors?
Surely hosting static files on the internet is trivial to accomplish these days, even without the help of Malwareforge.
Trivial, technically, but can still be an unwanted cost for projects that push a lot of bits out. Our software at SF.net burns through several terabytes of bandwidth each year for several million package downloads. We've always appreciated their network of mirrors. But, it seems like it's time to move away from SourceForge.

We already relocated our revision control to github (though I'm considering another move to a self-hosted thing on Phabricator or gogs or gitlab, as I'm more cautious about using third party services for this kind of stuff these days).

The thing is, it's not exactly "their" network of mirrors. They mostly rely on third-party mirrors run by universities and other organisations that offer mirroring for free to a bunch of major open source projects and sites.
GitLab CEO here, glad to hear you're considering using it, please let me know if we can help in any way.