Does SourceForge Have A Future?
Written by Ian Elliot   
Thursday, 11 February 2016

The new owners of SourceForge are hoping to halt the decline of the once popular source code repository and persuade open source projects to use it once more. The first move is to terminate the practice of bundling adware with software installations 

 

sourceforgebanner

 

SourceForge, and its stablemate Slashdot, were acquired at the end of January by web publisher BIZX, LLC from DHI, formerly Dice Holdings. which had owned it since 2012. SourceForge was originally launched in 1999 by VA Software cofounded by Larry Augustin and James Vera. This company later became Geeknet and acquired Slashdot as part of Andover.net in 2000.

SourceForge was already well established by the time GitHub, its main competitor, came on the scene in 2008.

Quite when SourceForge began its decline is hard to pinpoint, but last June we reported Projects Abandon SourceForge when the exodus was very obvious.

The question now is whether SourceForge can recover from the damage inflicted on it during the DHI era. 

In a blog post that also asks for feedback to help shape the future direction for the site announced, Logan Abbott, one of the owners of BIZX and president of its SourceForge Media subsidiary explained his intention to restore SourceForge's reputation as a trusted home for open source software. He states:  

Our first order of business was to terminate the “DevShare” program. As of last week, the DevShare program was completely eliminated. The DevShare program delivered installer bundles as part of the download for participating projects... We’re more interested in doing the right thing than making extra short-term profit.

He also indicates that the community can expect more developments intended to encourage them to return to SourceForge:

Plans for the near future include full https support for both SourceForge and Slashdot, and a lot more changes we think developers and end-users will embrace.

Whether this will be enough, remains to be seen. However, as GitHub is also facing managerial issues, this is a good time for the new SourceForge Media to be proactive.

 

sfsquare

 

More Information

SourceForge Acquisition and Future Plans

SourceForge

Related Articles

Projects Abandon SourceForge

Github Victim Of Its Own Success


 

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on, Twitter, FacebookGoogle+ or Linkedin.

 

Banner


TIOBE - Two To Rule Them All
16/07/2025

The July Tiobe index is out and it isn't particularly interesting until you notice that it confirms the standard model of programming -  code is written in Python and C and everything else is jus [ ... ]



Mozilla Discontinues DeepSpeech
03/07/2025

The DeepSpeech project started by Mozilla has updated its GitHub page with the message "This project is now discontinued", and a change in the project status to archived. 


More News

 

pico book

 

Comments




or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info

Last Updated ( Thursday, 11 February 2016 )