Thanks for your reply. First off, you're right, cheers for resuscitating SF.
Not that it would by any means be easy, I was suggesting a conceptual re-think of SF to attract and enthrall new users/projects. However your response (and the refrain I hear from others) indicates a strategy of monetizing the big binary projects you already have. That's cool, and that's a market. But I would fear
- those projects being coaxed away by innovations from services in adjacent markets (GitHub using enterprise revenue to cover download costs), and
- those big binary projects eventually dying (as projects sometimes do), without replacement from new young projects (because they will prefer to start on GitHub and will then mature there).
Perhaps go after the conceptual strategy of "SF is where you go when you've grow out of GitHub".
First off, SourceForge isn't me :) I just run one of the largest projects hosted on SourceForge.
Second, Github doesn't really offer what the big binaries on SourceForge need which is tons of bandwidth to host downloads. Github ditched downloads back in December but appears to have added them back in with 'Releases' last month. It remains to be seen how much bandwidth a free and open source project can actually push through Github, though. And whether Github will keep Releases/downloads around at all since they've only been around for a month and were unceremoniously killed off just 8 months prior.
SourceForge is a known quantity with download mirrors all over the world that you can push 10s of TBs per month through for free as long as you're a fully open source project. Github, on the other hand, is an unknown quantity with respect to big downloads.
Not that it would by any means be easy, I was suggesting a conceptual re-think of SF to attract and enthrall new users/projects. However your response (and the refrain I hear from others) indicates a strategy of monetizing the big binary projects you already have. That's cool, and that's a market. But I would fear
- those projects being coaxed away by innovations from services in adjacent markets (GitHub using enterprise revenue to cover download costs), and
- those big binary projects eventually dying (as projects sometimes do), without replacement from new young projects (because they will prefer to start on GitHub and will then mature there).
Perhaps go after the conceptual strategy of "SF is where you go when you've grow out of GitHub".
Good luck.