The news that Microsoft reportedly acquired GitHub has raised a storm to stir controversy. I am an old fashioned guy, but I am in favor of this acquisition. That’s because, for GitHub to maintain its current prosperity, they need an enormous amount of financial resources. That said, at the same time, I can understand why there are people who might be against this acquisition. It is a no brainer that there are people who just can’t accept Microsoft who had deemed then Linux and open source to be their adversary.
Already, people with negative feelings against Microsoft are spreading the topic about where they would migrate to.
Mong those are some people who recommend SourceForge.
I will say this with conviction that you should avoid SourceForge. You can go anywhere, but just not SourceForge!
SourceForge Hiding Fact that They Have Lost the Latest Revision of SVN
https://medium.com/@jonykatz/sourceforge-hiding-fact-that-they-have-lost-the-latest-revision-of-svn-d221f2d68285
If you read the article above, you can see the serious level of the problem that SourceForge has been confronted with. Things might seem to have calmed down a bit at this moment, but there were about 500 errors recently, and almost every day, there are times that you can’t use SVN and Git properly. It’s likely that, for the last several years, SourceForge system has not been able to reach the 95% uptime. Also, there hasn’t been any clear explanation given by SourceForge regarding the long lasting disorder since February this year.
What’s so annoying is that even in this distressing circumstances, the current SourceForge owner, the guy that came from BizX LLC is blatantly propagating that SourceForge has changed. They claim, “No more adware! Our site and ads are safer now”, but the fact of the matter is that their site is still infested with malware and advertising space has stretched to twice its original space there years ago. In addition, normally on Web sites, there’s a page link or UI at the fixed header, but on SourceForge, it’s filled with affiliated Ad contents that are very likely created by BizX LLC. Honestly when I looked at it first, I clearly remember that I got the threatening impression that I should do nothing on the site. That the entire UI could be advertising!
Nevertheless if their system exhibits more stability, then you might concede to using them, but as I have mentioned above, currently their system seldom operates with stability.
At this moment, I don’t think it’s necessary for GitHub users to strain hard to migrate to other sites, but if you really want to do so, then my advice is to go to GitLab or BitBucket. There may be some differences, but there aren’t any major differences that you need to worry about.
GitLab https://about.gitlab.com/
BitBucket https://bitbucket.org
The option of choosing SourceForge, functionally speaking, may impose difficulty, but should there be a reason why anyone wants to move to SourceForge, it would only be that you can perform distribution via release files. If you are a GitHub user, then you might be able to use the service called BinTray, but I don’t think this can singularly resolve everything.
The reason why I used SourceForge for a long period of time was because sourceForge had a very concise file manager feature. They allow easy uploads via rsync or sftp, and the uploads are instantly mirrored to the OSS mirror servers around the world. It is a simple mechanism that has existed from long ago, but SourceForge was the only service provider that offered such feature to general developers.
However, SourceForge may not be the only one. There seems to be a similar mechanism on OSDN to which TortoiseSVN and MinGW migrated. It’s good that there are a lot of mirror sites that are located outside of the USA, and you don’t have to wait more than 5 seconds for a download. The web design has an archaic look, but they have not even once gone through a system down of SourceForge magnitude.
The latest release of TortoiseSVN
https://osdn.net/projects/tortoisesvn/storage/1.10.0/
The least I can say is that there’s nothing that SourceForge has as an advantage against other sites. Also, it is clear that the operation resources of SourceForge have become far more vulnerable compared to the original state three years ago, and the owner only seems interested in increasing the space of native advertising. They don’t even care to show willingness of removing SPAM projects or malware.
Microsoft isn’t more malicious than SourceForge.
Even if you hate Microsoft, there are other options that are better than SourceForge.
SourceForge should be expunged from our memory.
Add.
How do I migrate from GitHub?
