This is a personal opinion, so please ignore if you do not agree. I feel there is too much adulation (perhaps bordering on unhealthy, even) around github and its services. So, every thriving alternative (to github) is very welcome in my view.
(git is a great VCS, etc., etc. But other VCS' are not exactly unworkable, you know)
This might be OT but, I am genuinely curious.
Why not SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/)? They are the grand-daddy of free and open hosting. They have been around for ages and providing free hosting services to all and sundry for as long as I can recall. I for one, am very grateful for their support of all the various open projects and the FOSS community support, before FOSS took off like it took off now. I have benefitted and continue to benefit from many a project even to this day -- and I am sure many of you all do use SF hosted projects too. One example, all the portable apps for example, are hosted with Sourceforge. So, why not use them and show your support? (Vote with your purse, etc., etc.)
P.S:- I don't have anything to do with SF. I am just interested in other thoughts and views.
EDIT: And Sourceforge actually allow you to host binaries unlike the recently inexplicable github rule of we will allow you to upload large, cutesy cat photos in comments, but disable hosting of binaries
Am I the only one who also enjoyed SF's newly revamped UI to keep with the times?
EDIT 2: They have recently started a monthly campaign called "Featured Projects" on their blog to highlight projects that don't have active work being done on them. So if one is interested one can "adopt a project" and nurture it back to health and relevance. E.g.: http://sourceforge.net/blog/featured-projects-2012120/
EDIT 3: In case others are interested (or may not be aware, as the case may be), there are also other VCS and free around those VCS repositories. Sharing it out of interest.
There are a few reasons I won't use SF for my projects.
First, I don't like all the advertisements and the time delay to download stuff. I understand hosting a lot of projects costs money, and that's part of the reason I pay for a GitHub account. I don't have any popular projects, but I like that the few who are interested don't have a million advertisements shoved in their face next to my stuff.
Second, there used to be a lot of hoops to jump through to get a project on SF. Admittedly I haven't tried in a long time, but there used to be several pages of forms to fill out when creating a new project on SF, including steps like selecting a license. On GitHub I click "New Repository" on my home page, fill in the project name and click "Create Repository".
Third, I don't care about binary hosting. IMO if a project is big enough that people who can't compile it themselves are starting to use it, the project should have its own site. For example, I've never gone to SF to get VLC, I've gone to the VLC website, and followed their download link. It's actually annoying to me that VLC hosts their binaries on SF, because I have to sit through the time delayed advertisements before downloading.
And finally, SF only hosts open source projects. With GitHub (and BitBucket) I have the ability to create private repositories for closed source applications.
Their creation process is now on par with github and others.
They got rid of the ads. Also I have adblockers installed. If you/your audience are the type frequenting HN and working on code by and large, you'll also have some kind of adblocker installed on the browsers? Aren't ads a non-issue under these circumstances?
When I see a project on SourceForge I assume it's over 10 years old and unmaintained.
For years, SourceForge has been among the ugliest, least usable sites on the internet, and now it has massive amounts of ad spam all over it.
One of the reasons Github grew so quickly was simply b/c of the better UX. Git is marginally better than other version control systems, but the major void that Github filled was that it offered a nice looking, usable place to put open source code.
Their UX/sign-in etc., is now on par with github and others.
They got rid of the ads also. Also I have adblockers installed. If you/your audience are the type frequenting HN and working on code by and large, you'll also have some kind of adblocker installed on the browsers? Aren't ads a non-issue under these circumstances?
>> When I see a project on SourceForge I assume it's over 10 years old and unmaintained
Hmmm.. I don't even know where or how to address that strong an opinion (I'm not even sure I want to, TBH). Let's just say, that's not a correct statement.
P.S: Github (blog) also carries job ads on the sides, so does SO. At times, ads are a necessary evil of the internet ecosystem, specially when it comes to (largely) free services
While they have definitely make jumps in their UI and UX. It is Definitely NOT on par with GitHub.
And they didn't get rid of Ads. There are simply less of them. Not that i have a problem with earning money from Ads, but from a limited UI point of view we already have too many info we want and need.
Has SourceForge done this years earlier it may still have a fighting chance against Github. Now the only contender left is BitBucket.
They serve entirely different purposes. Sourceforge looks like a sales page, listing features and downloads. Gitub has the contents of the source right there at the top, before the readme or description, even!
Github seems to be focused on developers, while sourceforge is like a download portal for open source software.
>> Sourceforge looks like a sales page, listing features and downloads.
>> Gitub has the contents of the source right there at the top
This is a non issue (as far as I see it). Everyone that is interested in a project is not necessarily interested in submitting pull requests and contribute to code every time, all the time, right from the start. They might just want to integrate the project into their workflow to begin with. This is just as valid an assumption to make.
While we are comparing projects, let us compare VLC player (a really huge beast) with something more comparable. For argument's sake let's take adobe brackets that is actually hosted on github. The proportion of people wanting to download the binary and use it would be much higher than the percentage of people interested in contributing code back to brackets. So I think that people looking for Adobe Brackets would appreciate a link to the downloads page (similar to Sourceforge) rather than the pull request view... https://github.com/adobe/brackets/downloads
> This is a non issue (as far as I see it). Everyone that is interested in a project is not necessarily interested in submitting pull requests and contribute to code every time, all the time, right from the start. They might just want to integrate the project into their workflow to begin with. This is just as valid an assumption to make.
That's the point. GitHub is for the people who are as interested in the code as they are in the software itself.
If the majority of a project's end users are only interested in grabbing the binary, then the project should have a separate page somewhere else. I'd guess the majority of the projects on GitHub aren't at that level, though.
>> GitHub is for the people who are as interested in the code as they are in the software itself.
I'd argue that it is the same for SF as well. Like I mentioned with the Adobe brackets example, based on the nature of the project, a download might be a first choice to test the waters. SF is largely Java/C++/etc., centric (as opposed to RoR or javascript projects) so the installer is the first place to go, to test the tool in the first place. See another reply that echoes this sentiment... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4908007
>> If the majority of a project's end users are only interested in grabbing the binary, [...snip...] I'd guess the majority of the projects on GitHub aren't at that level, though.
Have you seen this recent thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4907830
You'll find binary uploads are a very much a relevant and needed option to many others even within the github 'ecosystem'.
I think you may have hit the nail on the head with the cultural difference between "Java/C++/etc.", where downloading some sort of artifact is a more common use case than reading code, and "RoR or javascript", where it is the opposite. There is no good or bad here, but if you care more about code than artifact, Github is the better option.
I wasn't arguing if one was good or bad over the other either. If we are looking at alternatives, all alternatives should be discussed, and I took it upon myself to bring sourceforge into the discussion.
>> may have hit the nail on the head with the cultural difference between "Java/C++/etc.", where downloading some sort of artifact is a more common use case than reading code, and "RoR or javascript", where it is the opposite.
I think it took a few back and forth replies before I realised that this could be the main point ;-)
On the whole, reading source online for gaining knowledge is possible on all the repositories, but I noticed that there is definitely a bias/inertia favouring github on most discussions(). Hence my overall thread.
() perhaps due to the fact that this is HN, where the audience/many discussions revolve around internet based startups, that in turn focusses on using RoR/javascript heavily.
(git is a great VCS, etc., etc. But other VCS' are not exactly unworkable, you know)
This might be OT but, I am genuinely curious.
Why not SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/)? They are the grand-daddy of free and open hosting. They have been around for ages and providing free hosting services to all and sundry for as long as I can recall. I for one, am very grateful for their support of all the various open projects and the FOSS community support, before FOSS took off like it took off now. I have benefitted and continue to benefit from many a project even to this day -- and I am sure many of you all do use SF hosted projects too. One example, all the portable apps for example, are hosted with Sourceforge. So, why not use them and show your support? (Vote with your purse, etc., etc.)
P.S:- I don't have anything to do with SF. I am just interested in other thoughts and views.
EDIT: And Sourceforge actually allow you to host binaries unlike the recently inexplicable github rule of we will allow you to upload large, cutesy cat photos in comments, but disable hosting of binaries
Am I the only one who also enjoyed SF's newly revamped UI to keep with the times?
EDIT 2: They have recently started a monthly campaign called "Featured Projects" on their blog to highlight projects that don't have active work being done on them. So if one is interested one can "adopt a project" and nurture it back to health and relevance. E.g.: http://sourceforge.net/blog/featured-projects-2012120/
And then there is the "Project of the month" http://sourceforge.net/blog/potm/
EDIT 3: In case others are interested (or may not be aware, as the case may be), there are also other VCS and free around those VCS repositories. Sharing it out of interest.
E.g.: https://launchpad.net/bzr
https://launchpad.net/