SourceForge still provides a few things that other services do not, like full hosting (not just static pages), mailing lists, public file hosting, forums/discussions and a bunch of other more minor stuff like screenshots, news, etc which can be helpful if one doesn't want to setup a full site (so on the same place you have both the option to go with a full site or to ignore it and have the service provide most of the functionality you'd need to provide yourself anyway).
In addition, as a user it has reviews, categorization with subcategories (which allow the service to suggest other relevant projects), update notifications, etc.
So, strictly speaking, SF provides more to projects and some projects do want that so it makes sense to see new stuff popping up in SF.
The main reason SF isn't used much these days is that the site had its reputation badly damaged some years ago while it was owned by some shady company that tried to squeeze everything they could out of it. But last year (i think) it got bought by people who seem to care about the service and doing the right things so far. Of course healing the reputation is a hard thing to do.
Personally i self host most of my stuff, but i do know of some projects that take advantage of those extra features (e.g. FreeGLUT uses the mailing lists extensively).
Of course I am partial to savannah gnu and nongnu for its philosophy. However over the years there have been too many outages that made me switch one my projects from savannah to github.
Since beggars shouldn't be too picky, I don't fault savannah: it is seriously understaffed by volunteers. But still I switched to github (for some things) mostly from a pragmatic point of view. And to reduce my frustration level during the outages.
This project has been around for many years it seems (eyeballing the commit graph on github, it looks like 2004 or so). It doesn't surprise me if you'd pick Sourceforge in 2004, but they've done enough dodgy stuff that I'd choose something else today.
At first, they had a confusing download UI with "DOWNLOAD NOW" advertisements that went to unrelated software.
Then, they were wrapping adware into OSS project installers.
You are correct. At the time this was started there was no github; or git for that matter. I think I joined github around 2006 or so, and sometime after that converted either the CVS or svn repo to git.
And I was a bit lazy in setting up the project since I didn't know at the time how long it would last. So it is under the mostly unrelated bashdb project that I started earlier. (The tenuous relationship was that I wanted to debug autoconf configure scripts, and having done that I then realized I often also needed to debug the Makefiles that automake produced. Okay I tried to motivate that, but really it was laziness.)
As for sourceforge or github, there are a couple of things. As others have mentioned, sourceforge has a file release section. That is very useful for those who want to work off of release tarballs, rather than git tags. And the download stats can be ordered by both OS of downloading browser and Geography.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/bashdb/files/remake/stats/t... says mostly downloaded in US with MS Windows. Looks like the SF mapping function is broken, but I used to find it fun to see country distribution. Continent-wise, Africa has always been the lowest in activity.
Over the years sourceforge has proved very reliable and has done lots of people a great service.
In the early days I admired how good it was. Yes, it is unfortunate that they couldn't figure out how to monetize the good work they had done. Well, I have the same problem too. I'm not one to forget the good work they have accrued in the past. However, as you saw, I did switch to github for day-to-day use and use sourceforge for released tarballs, and mailing lists.
I don't see anything wrong with using multiple providers. I also use Travis, CircleCI and Appveyor for continuous integration testing.
> Apparently, SourceForge's mysterious "sf-editor1" has also claimed ownership of a number of other accounts for open source and other software projects. The following are just a sampling of downloads now "brought to you by sf-editor1":
> (List follows)
I'm not quoting the list because the article is two years out of date and I'll honestly say I don't want to fact-check the status of the listed projects. But I will say this. I followed https://sourceforge.net/u/sf-editor1/profile/ out of curiosity, and was met with
In full disclosure I have not opened all of the above.
To be fair, most say "/mirror/" instead of "/p/" so it's clear these are namespaced and considered differently.
I saw the comment in this subthread about SF being sold to a group that's trying to clean up their reputation, so I won't pass judgement. It was very interesting to see all these headline projects owned by sf-editor1 though.
