Sounds like this can only be good for SourceForge after the previous scuzziness:
> "When I say trusted – I mean trusted," he went on. "We disagree with some of the previous monetization strategies from an industry and business perspective, and have immediate plans to discontinue programs inconsistent with our being a trusted and reliable resource for the entire open source community.
I wish them luck. I'm not thrilled by the GitHub monoculture.
It doesn't look good, it's great. I mean it. They give Gitlab CE for free on their website, see what it can do: https://about.gitlab.com/features/#enterprise Only gitlab.com does more than github + integration service. Recently GL CEO wrote here on HN that if you host gitlab yourself for your opensource project you could get lifetime CE version by writing to them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10924406
Our Community Edition (CE) is MIT licensed and will always be free for everyone, without asking. We discussed giving GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) licenses to open source projects. But it turned out that it is better to make the features that are essential open source completely https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10926400 So we did that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10931884 and will keep doing that.
Please email me or support@gitlab.com with this problem. I've never heard this before and we take this very seriously.
Our Omnibus packages installs all GitLab dependencies in the /opt directory. If this is not your thing it might be good to know that there are now official native Debian packages for GitLab 8.4 (still working on Jesse backport).
Their pricing is different to Github. GH pricing increases with the number of private repositories needed, whereas BB prices based on team members, with unlimited private repositories.
For a small team like ours, with lots of small repositories, it's a no brainer.
It's the little things that make the difference for me - like being able to restrict pushing to certain branches to either specific people or specific groups, which has saved a lot of accidents.
When you're developing an open source application, though, you need the community of Github. I'm hoping that changes in the future. Not that Github goes away, just that alternatives are equally as viable to build a community around.
Indeed, that and I like it's team -> project -> repository UI a great deal, even though I mostly work alone I can create a team for each client, multiple projects and repositories spread between them.
I've few complaints about bitbucket and when you consider it's still free for me it's insane (I've felt so bad by how much I used it I kinda wish they would charge a few bucks a month sometimes).
I have many small open source projects, so bitbucket (which has unlimited public repositories) is in theory a better fit for these: each project can gets its own repository, vs. having each project in a sub-directory of one repository in github.
Unfortunately, bitbucket lacks some features: their markdown syntax does not allow HTML and they have no views / downloads statistics. The lack of statistics means that their search feature is not so good- no way to sort by popularity.
I'm trying gitlab now: it also doesn't seem to have views/downloads stats. Also the web-site was slow a few days ago.
The lack of statistics is odd: even sourceforge has this.
Yes, my current preference is for Bitbucket, but a large part of that is that I personally prefer Hg to Git. I still eneded up finally making a GitHub account just because so many other projects are hosted there.
Not just that, SF's infrastructure is incredibly obsolete.
Before the malware shenanigans started, they could have tried to relaunch with a full rewrite, keeping just the brand. Now even the brand is tainted, there is nothing left except a large database of users and SSH keys (and Slashdot, which apparently is still read by some people).
I think that's a bit harsh.. there is still a ton of software hosted only on sourceforge. And plenty of people that need the software that don't know about sourceforge's bad behavior. When I am researching random software or libraries, I find myself on an almost daily basis temporarily overriding the ublock rule for sourceforge.
Well, hosting everything with a service that is backed by a company and over
which you have no control was never a good move. See how Rainer Gerhards hosts
his rsyslog (http://blog.gerhards.net/2013_12_01_archive.html): one canonical
repository, and GitHub as a peer. Given git's distributed nature, there can be
as many clones in as many services (Gitlab, BitBucket, others) as maintainers
deem sensible.
The same could be said of gitorious.org shutting down, but for the past 8 months it's been inaccessible by the Web or via git. It's just recently returned as a read-only archive (thanks to archive.org, I believe); they claim that clone URLs should work again now, although I've not had reason to try one yet.
Keep in mind that even with announcements and long shutdowns, many projects would be lost without officially-sanctioned archiving; either because their author has moved on, or they might do all of their project interaction via git commands and never see warnings on the Web interface.
This is like saying that rsync and dropbox are the same thing. A github exodus is certainly possible, and it's great that github doesn't have a ton of tight lock-in (though it has some) via proprietary crap, but it's still a lot of work to leave github.
Incidentally, have you seen the original Dropbox post on HN? The second top comment is all about how it's pointless because you can "trivially" build the same thing yourself with FTP and other assorted software.
Except that the git is the least important part of GitHub. The real value is in the community and the extra services that it provides around the git source control system.
To move away from GitHub one would have to not only clone the repository (and all of the branches, tags, etc), but also scrape off the Wiki, Issues, and contact information of contributors. Then they would need to set up an alternative with a similar security infrastructure and notify everyone relevant to its existence.
There is not even a measurement tool for trust on commits right now. Nothing like- (Line / NrOfDiffrentComittersTouching)* ComitersTrustworthyness according to other Projects * NrOfSimilarUnreviewedLines
Where there is no metric, there is no trust, not even in open source.
Slashdot was a big part of my early years in the tech industry. It had it's own cultural quirks, but overall was a great place to get general 'news for nerds'. I still visit every so often as it gives a slightly different angle on the industry to HN. Much like lxer.com.
It was a big part of my news in the past too. But I started hating the attitude and snarkiness that overtook the site. People lost the art of discussing and debating things and instead focussed on too-often repeated memes and abuse. Honestly, I fond Hacker News and never went back. I actually think I had forgotten it even existed until this post. As for SourceForge ... good riddance to that malware infested cesspit.
I used to go to SlashDot, in the same way that I come to HN now- for good tech-related news that I couldn't find anywhere else. The comments used to spawn great swaths of related research but now I might as well go to 4chan. Fortunately HN is still awesome and the comments always add to a discussion.
Me too. Slashdot's comment system was a bit more advanced. Slashdot's downwind came from Digg, Reddit and HN. Though the insightful comments switched directly from Slashdot to HN. And HN is changing too, less startup news, bubble fears, more general public audience, more corporate spam (and voting rings, sock puppets) - though it's still a very great community and I hope it remains like that for several more years. A tech news site is great because of the comments and the news selection - and the HN algorithms work usually great.
Anyone remember seeing the occasional "(Score: 5, Troll)" comment, which only happened when a comment got downvoted as "Troll" and then upvoted as "Underrated" (which didn't change the "tag")?
Anyone remember seeing the occasional "(Score: 5, Troll)" comment, which only happened when a comment got downvoted as "Troll" and then upvoted as "Underrated" (which didn't change the "tag")?
I had a few of those. I was more proud of my "(Score: -1, Insightful)" though.
Having been involved in the anti-spam thing for a while, I can simplify the "spam solutions" checklist to two items:
1) Do you have a solution to one piece of the spam problem?
( ) Yes - go away, you don't solve the whole spam problem.
( ) No - go away, you're not helping to solve the spam problem
2) Do you have a solution to the whole spam problem?
( ) Yes - go away, you're a FUSTTSP scammer
( ) No - go away, you're not helping to solve the spam problem.
The explicit approach by the SMTP people was both of the above at the same time. Incremental solutions were derided as "the spammers will just try something else". Major fixes to SMTP were derided as "it takes a decade to deploy a new protocol".
Well, it's been a decade since I was involved. Changes to SMTP practices mean that I've got jump through more hoops to prove my worthiness when I send email. But the amount of spam I'm getting hasn't gone down.
My favorite Slashdot comment was attached to a story about discovering spycams in Russia. I don't remember the particulars of the story, but the entirely apropos comment was,
Early on they were a great site, then they let politics take over, either directly or indirect. The indirect story method happens here too, a moderately technology oriented or business oriented title but an article usually bashing one side of the political spectrum. /. screwed up because they let their bias be known and moderation was obviously affected.
Don't miss the site for it became, do miss it for what it was.
I was a reader too but really hated their pedantic attitude: difficulty for passing their filter to post a news, and the owners not modifying a post when you pointed to an inaccurate news item (e.g: claiming that a security bug was discovered by someone else).
> "Indeed, he promised to return SourceForge to its glory days, not only by undoing the harm that’s been done, but by bringing rapid development and much needed improvements to the site’s infrastructure."
I sure hope that means downloading projects from sourceforge can happen on a modern timescale. I have more bandwidth in my bedroom than their infrastructure.
I haven't been on /. forever but I think a strategy focused more around gossipy/soapy topics and embracing the long tail of your (stereo)typical IT worker (tech gadgets, scify, comics etc.) would be decent. HN covers the "techy" and "startupy" segments fairly well.
I have no idea how SourceForge will turn out. In my mind it's tarnished forever due to the crapware shenanigans. They have some "community building" features that seem valuable, used to have a decent brand name and it's never bad to have an extra place for storing FLOSS.
I wish them every success. I used to use both sites extensively. I still have accounts on both (and a "coveted" 5 digit user ID on slashdot), but I rarely go there these days.
Seriously though, it looks like I last logged in 4 years ago. As far as I can see it's become more hysterical and niche than before, which I wouldn't have thought possible, given the long threads dedicated to e.g. defending Hans Reiser.
Mine is 64K or so, signed up six months after I had been reading the site when I owned an ISP in Hong Kong.
I still read the headlines every day but I haven't looked at a comment thread in years. I'm still quite fond of /. despite their shortcomings.
I was visiting the States when their anniversary came up and there were /. meetups set up around the country. We went to the one in San Diego and was genuinely surprised at the low quality of tech knowledge and level of conversation... bit of a let down.....
Neither did owning Slashdot via VA Linux, just ask Eric Raymond about the ups (I am now ... absurdly rich). [1] and downs [2] (Nope. Didn’t sell before the bust.)
Not websites I know, but AOL instant messenger is really good these days. Gnutella is actually pretty alright. There was a brief cultural moment a few months ago in Shoreditch when some hipsters started using myspace again, but that seems to have petered out. I've heard it claimed that MetaFilter went through a bad patch and then recovered - not involved enough to know anything more about that though.
The early adoption I'm really kicking myself for was shutting down a bitcoin CPU miner after calculating that the electrical cost made it a break even. It never occurred to me that the price of a bitcoin would go up with no reason behind it.
I've got a 5 digit slashdot id (same account name), but my ICQ number was 6 digits -- before they deleted it when I was running a bot on it :( I was pretty upset about that for a while.
1st) Blockstackers Intergalactic (Slashdot's original parent) sold to Andover.net.
Andover.net got bought by VA Linux.
VA Linux changes it's name to Geeknet.
2nd) Geeknet sells sells Slashdot and Sourceforge to Dice.
3rd)Dice sells it to these guys.
I still wish Malda and the other guys writing the Slashcode would've realized that the future was not in blogging/advertising but in making Slashcode great. They had a good start on building something just like Drupal and a big head start but they never saw that as a business. (not like I saw it either, sadly)
The previous owner was pretty stupid. The Slashdot "Beta" was almost as catastrophic as the Digg.com fiasco. Well good that Beta vanished, good for Slashdot.
SourceForge could have been a wonderfull thing, especially when it comes to serving binaries from OSS. They destroyed their reputation with them bundling software will malware or hijacking projects... They could have opened their infrastructure to commercial orgs for instance, to build then deliver software ... No, they had to go the cheapest route and violate their core user's trust.
> "When I say trusted – I mean trusted," he went on. "We disagree with some of the previous monetization strategies from an industry and business perspective, and have immediate plans to discontinue programs inconsistent with our being a trusted and reliable resource for the entire open source community.
I wish them luck. I'm not thrilled by the GitHub monoculture.