Exodus from GitHub, but just not to SourceForge

https://medium.com/@jonykatz/exodus-from-github-but-just-not-to-sourceforge-690845933cf7

by jonymo • 8 years ago

41 65 8 years ago

nimbius• 8 years ago

even if the peanut gallery is still out on whether this is a 'smart move' from microsoft or not, the point in the article is real. Sourceforge and Gitlab are both having serious issues keeping pace with the number of users moving their projects.

gitlabs grafana instances are all but completely unresponsive as of this post. Timeouts and such from the web UI were rampant as of 0700am PST but they seem to be under control.

If i were a gambling man, I'd venture this to be the worst decision Microsoft has made since they hoovered up Minecraft for six billion dollars only to be left to watch PUBG and fortnight run miles past it, and multiple open source server implementations show up.

lgl• 8 years ago

the worst decision Microsoft has made since they hoovered up Minecraft for six billion dollars only to be left to watch PUBG and fortnight run miles past it

How is Minecraft in the same bucket as PUBG or Fortnite? Also, Microsoft bought Minecraft some 3 years before PUBG even launched. It has sold about 144 million copies and has 75 million monthly users. It's the second best-selling video game of all time behind Tetris. How is that a "worst decision"?

lalos5• 8 years ago

I don't understand why the people have this huge team mentality. If this team does that, it wrong, if another does it it is ok. Google cancelled Google Code with no backlash, or at least not to this level. Microsoft is trying to save a vital company in the open source community that didn't even have a CEO or any path to profitability and people react like they are going to ban all projects that are not C#. Not only in tech, but elsewhere I see a trend of just following a herd mentality instead of judging every action by it's own weight or at least let it play out. Of course, if you are afraid have a plan B or backup what ever you see fit but we need more critical thinking in our daily lives.

joering2• 8 years ago

Or you know - use BitBucket that allows unlimited number of private repos for free afaik.

lalos5• 8 years ago

I love competition and choice, I'm not even a fan of Github but I see their importance in the game. I'm criticizing herd mentality and something bigger than where you host a repo. I'm asking for critical thinking and that is it.

linuxps2• 8 years ago

Google did face backlash and it wasn't to this level because its use wasn't nearly as ubiquitous

superflyguy3• 8 years ago

This is an altruistic move on Microsoft's part? Puhleaze. And Google routinely gets beaten up for killing projects, it's just that nobody used Google Code.

lalos5• 8 years ago

I will have to disagree with that, back in the day I remember using more Google Code than Github. Maybe I was more into fringe projects that were not big enough and on Github, but in my personal experience the pain was felt when we lost a bunch of issues and documentation of the platform and not the code itself or the binaries. Plus, this seems like a strategy of Microsoft to win some brownie points in the open source community unless they see a huge money making opportunity that I'm not seeing.

some_account• 8 years ago

Please tell me you are trolling people. You can't seriously believe what you are writing here. Microsoft is an ugly company with ugly business practices and they are absolutely not trying to save anybody.

optimuspaul• 8 years ago

Have you been paying attention to Microsoft over the past few years? They have an ugly past, but they are a different company now. I actually think this is a good thing for the community. I for one am sticking with GitHub.

preinheimer3• 8 years ago

Could you expand on what you're saying here? How are they ugly? What previous acquisitions in this realm have they screwed over?

I'd love to educate myself further, but need more details.

lalos5• 8 years ago

I want people to judge by themselves. You can argue that yes, they have made some mistakes and probably bad practices like all companies. Try to get out of the tech bubble, companies in the world run on Excel. That alone has a huge impact on society. Not everything is black and white. I'm just a fan of critical thinking and not herd mentality not of Microsoft. I'm criticizing the reaction of all this.

alexeiz• 8 years ago

Microsoft is trying to save a vital company...

So Microsoft is in the "company saving" business now? This couldn't be farther from the truth. They bought Github not to save it, but to use it as a resource for whatever goals they deem appropriate. And I really doubt Microsoft's goals align with open source well.

lalos5• 8 years ago

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/goodwill.asp

Either goodwill, a cheap deal since they were about to fold, gain trust for people to use Azure Linux or Azure open source platform, etc. I have no idea, but goodwill is an option.

murukesh_s• 8 years ago

Which big corporate's is? If Microsoft can't be trusted neither Google, Facebook,IBM or Oracle for that matter. They could ruin or shut it down if it's not aligning with their goal which is to make money.

zgramana3• 8 years ago

SMH. I used to work for Nat at Xamarin before it was acquired by MSFT. GitHub and Xamarin have had a long and deep relationship going back to at least 2012 (that I’m aware of anyway).

Xamarin was run on GitHub. We never used any other version control system. GitHub used Xamarin extensively as well. There were a lot of overlapping social graphs between the engineers of both as well.

Miguel and Nat both helped to make F/OSS and Linux what it is today—thank them if you like GNOME. Nat represents MSFT in this deal, and that’s great news for F/OSS enthusiasts everywhere.

Nat and Scott Guthrie aren’t responsible for the “sins of their fathers.” Time to move on from the Microsoft hating. That era has been over for a while.

uncletammy• 8 years ago

Not only in tech, but elsewhere I see a trend of just following a herd mentality instead of judging every action by it's own weight or at least let it play out.

It's a consequence of hooking up all world's information before people understand how to safely digest it. It will fix itself if we can find an equilibrium before we all destroy each other.

superflyguy3• 8 years ago

I don't think a single person is considering moving from GitHub to Sourceforge.

craftyguy• 8 years ago

No kidding. Sourceforge is the future of github, in the best case. Ads everywhere, binay spyware injected into your projects, etc.

TheChaplain• 8 years ago

You are talking about the old Sourceforge, since their recent acquisition they've done a great deal to clean up their act.

Arubis• 8 years ago

Arguments about migration itself aside, using SourceForge as a destination would last have occurred to me about 15 years ago. Very puzzling title.

throw_away2• 8 years ago

It's like reading an article about how people don't use freshmeat any more. Freshmeat is apparently now owned by the same people as sourceforge and slashdot, so when they get that time machine back to 1999 hooked up, they're going to be rolling in the money.

loganabbott6• 8 years ago

Almost nothing in this article is accurate. We’ve been doing everything we can to improve SourceForge and we did not hide anything. The writer has an axe to grind for some reason, and maybe his anger is warranted, but it's definitely directed at the wrong people. https://sourceforge.net/blog/introducing-the-new-sourceforge...

mkirklions• 8 years ago

Removed bundled adware from projects

Too late, already lost my trust.

This was unexcusable to let happen years ago and was one of the scummiest things I experienced in the software world.

I havent used sourceforge in years and have gone out of my way to avoid it. They cannot be trusted.

EthanHeilman• 8 years ago

They need to rebrand. Saying "download my new project from sourceforge" is an easy way to get cheap laughs from developers. I'm not saying this to dunk on sourceforge, but to make a point that the brand has so much ill will, broken trust and baggage associated with it that the first step should be a rename.

preinheimer3• 8 years ago

Having read some of the articles around the missing SVN commits it certainly didn't seem to me like SourceForge was being transparent (or "New"). Was there some big outreach after that incident I would have missed?

mort963• 8 years ago

I'm actually very genuinely curious: Why did you take over SourceForge and keep its extremely tainted brand, instead of starting something new? Usually, when someone buys a brand, they're doing it because there's some value attached to it, but for me at least, it'll take a lot more for me to try out SourceForge than a service with a completely fresh brand I haven't heard about before.

loganabbott6• 8 years ago

Because over a million people daily still use SourceForge, and over 500,000 projects do as well. We're focused on doing right by them.

stuntkite3• 8 years ago

I remember back when 15ish years ago when SourceForge was a neat thing. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why I would go there for any reason. Let alone host anything I cared about on that domain.

It's not even death by a thousand cuts, which y'all have done to yourself, but you also just failed to provide anything in the last 10 years that felt like it wasn't a cop out. Ignoring the abysmal failures and adware issues, which should be a non starter anyway.

We have tons of options that aren't SourceForge. Why is this even really a discussion? Gonna link to your SF from your My_?

EDIT:

Apparently SF is under new management and they are trying to change people's perception and are making good by a some accounts. I stand by what I said before I knew that, but I look forward to them contributing to the community in a way we can all respect.

rblatz• 8 years ago

You are replying to the new CEO that bought sourceforge in 2016 and stopped the shady behavior and terrible practices.

yodon• 8 years ago

This exodus is precisely why Microsoft bought github, and why Microsoft built VS Code, and why it is open sourcing .NET Core and why it is shipping Linux integration into Windows and all the other huge moves the company is making.

They recognize they lost the hearts and minds of developers. They are fixing that. Not fixed. Fixing. It’ll take the better part of a decade and some people will never change.

Five years ago no one would have expected Microsoft to ship an amazing editor on Linux and OSX. Its great to have such an amazing development team once again actively believing “developers, developers, developers” is the key to success. I can’t wait to see what they do with GitHub as they work to regain relevance and interest.

briffle2• 8 years ago

Yet most of their other tools still don't work on Linux, and have no public roadmap to, or any kind of comments on.. I'm waiting on my MS Teams client.... I can understand the older software, that might have lots of history, legacy libraries, etc, but Teams is a brand new tool they are just releasing.. They have a chrome plugin, but it requires you install an MSI.

briffle2• 8 years ago

Sorry, to clarify my frustration, the windows client for Teams is an electron based application.

zgramana3• 8 years ago

It works great on macOS. ;)

Support for a tertiary platform (in terms of addressable market share) like Linux desktops comes much later in this kind of product’s maturation.

Teams needs to first gain wider enterprise adoption on Windows and macOS first before they will look at allocating resources to additional platforms. Better off sticking with Slack on Linux until then.

prdonahue• 8 years ago

"Microsoft bought GitHub? Let's move everything to SourceForge!" -- said no developer, ever.

hungerstrike• 8 years ago

How can we actually quantify this alleged exodus? I'd like to see which projects are moving.

grolimpio• 8 years ago

I'm not sure if this will be good or bad for GitHub in the long run (it might actually bring some benefits to GitHub users, by adding more free services, e.g. free private repository), but still, Microsoft as a corporation is not open source friendly, as far as I know, the company still operates its own in-house patent troll and targeting open source related projects/services.

This is an old article, but I don't think a lot has changed since then: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/...

If anyone knows if they have stopped making money suing or making dodge deals with Linux/Android vendors, I'd love to know, if so, I'd start to believe that they, as a corporation, are becoming more open source friendly.

There is a big difference in buying patents for the company's own protection, and buying patents for making money trolling other companies. And unfortunately M$ is on the second group, making money as a patent troll.

Exodus from GitHub, but just not to SourceForge

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