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SourceForgetaboutit. Unless you're after an established project's content.
January 19, 2019

SourceForgetaboutit. Unless you're after an established project's content.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SourceForge

Currently, we are not using SourceForge for our needs. We investigated a number of collaborative source code hosting solutions, and have opted against SourceForge for a number of reasons.
  • A large library of impressive FOSS programs with long legacies.
  • Excellent discussion/forum threads for the various repositories/projects.
  • Integrated download metrics displayed next to content to help end-users see which release/files are most popular.
  • End-User centric approach, easier to distribute and download content from.
  • Reviews for the project/content on the project page. Brilliant!
  • A brief period where abandoned projects were altered by SourceForge to have ad-ware bundled into installers.
  • Lack of direct/easy integration with popular tools like VSCode.
  • Development community seems to have shifted towards Git/Bitbucket for most big projects.
  • No appreciable impact.
Once again I must circle back to the incident(s) in the past where SourceForge adulterated abandoned projects... I dislike that practice immensely.

I have selected against SourceForge in my usage for the stated reasons, and have moved on to GitHub, especially as private repositories are now free.
Given the disastrous decision (though only briefly executed) to modify abandoned projects to gain ad revenue, I'd have to say that I can't think of why I'd recommend anyone host their content there if they're already not entrenched in SourceForge. Compound that with the critical mass of new projects/developers moving to Git/Bitbucket, and the lack of easy integration with popular tools, I'd view SourceForge as a secondary place to host compiled code for download perhaps, due to their cleaner/nicer interface for downloading files from projects.

As an end-user, SourceForge is once again a (mostly) trustworthy repository for some great FOSS project downloads, discussion boards, and issue reporting.