You’ve probably already heard the news, but if you haven’t, Microsoft agreed to acquire GitHub today. The team at SourceForge would like to extend a big congratulations to everyone at GitHub. The value that GitHub has contributed to the open source community over the past decade is immeasurable.
We have always believed that the FOSS community is best served when there’s a greater number of options for viable, trustworthy online destinations for sharing and collaborating on open source software development. We wish Microsoft and GitHub well in future years, and this huge acquisition is evidence of how globally important open source software has become.
With that said, we’d like to highlight the value we believe SourceForge brings to the open source landscape. Today, SourceForge serves over 100 million software downloads per month, is visited by over a million users per day, and is home to 3.7 million registered developers.
To give a little history, SourceForge was founded in 1999, and in the nearly two decades following has been serving the open source community as one of the world’s largest open source software repositories. SourceForge was most recently acquired in 2016 and the new SourceForge team has been working extremely hard to improve the SourceForge experience for both developers and end-users. The very first thing we did after acquiring SourceForge two years ago was remove bundled installers from projects, a move universally applauded in the developer community. Since then, further improvements have included:
- Implemented malware scans for every single project on SourceForge
- Removed ads for developers (if you’re logged in, you’ll never see ads)
- Added HTTPS support for project website hosting and all downloads
- Completely redesigned SourceForge.net from the ground up, giving it a refreshed modern look and feel that has markedly improved all aspects of user experience.
- Added multi-factor authentication
- Created an ad reporting tool and team to eliminate bad and/or deceptive ads
What’s Next?
This year, we’ll be announcing new features including vast improvements to our suite of developer tools.
One of SourceForge’s main strengths has always been our ability to empower open source software developers to reach a huge amount of potential end-users through our powerful software distribution capabilities. We’re the first large-scale open source software repository on the Internet, and in the last two decades have seen history made with our tools several times. Paradigm-shifting technologies like Bitcoin were first developed on SourceForge.
Why SourceForge?
We have the most robust search and discovery system of any open source repository on the web, and offer an unparalleled experience for end-users looking for software binaries they can download and install with the click of a button. We’re talking about a destination for end-users to find and download and install the software they need, similar to an App Store but for FOSS. GitHub and SourceForge are both great for developers, but for the layman, non-technical, end-user, SourceForge is much easier to find and install a project.
On the developer side, we provide detailed download statistics and versatile mailing lists to project admins. We also offer developers the optional ability to display user reviews on their project page. In addition, we’ve recently improved the detail and granularity of the statistics we provide project admins with significantly. Our powerful software search and discovery tools are now much easier to use, with all project categorization types now available as filters on the left side of the Directory pages. 2018 will see us further improve on these capabilities.
Regarding GitHub
Another feature we’ve built is a GitHub Importer tool that will import your GitHub project to SourceForge and sync your GitHub project file releases on SourceForge. We’ve already seen a huge surge in projects being imported to SourceForge from GitHub in the last few days. You can use it as a one-time import, or it can continue to use GitHub but use our importer to keep your releases updated on SourceForge as well, so you can take advantage of the strengths of both platforms. Again, we believe the open source community is always better served when there are multiple options for open source projects to live.
Again, congrats GitHub!
– The SourceForge Team