There is zero excuse for what they did, and zero excuse for what they have been doing for the past years.
Once again reposting what I said in the other thread (which seems to have been modded off the frontpage, sad).
I'm one of the lead devs of LXQt and an LXDE sysadmin. We use Sourceforge for our mailing lists and some LXDE legacy stuff.
I'm absolutely sick of them. It's not the first time this has happened. I've been pushing for us to move off SF for a while and this is a good occasion to push for it harder.
I've sent an email [1] detailing plans to move. I am urging everyone who still has projects on Sourceforge to do the same.
If you have similar migration problems to solve as the ones I've highlighted in the email, please contact me directly and we can share the workload. My email is available on my Github profile [2].
It's unfortunate there aren't many good hosted mailing list services out there. Google Groups makes it hard to use without a google id, and mailman is tricky to setup/maintain.
I wish Github would get into that business. Easily set up MLs for organizations/projects and integrate them, do what they do in regular issues (markdown processing, autolinking issues etc).
In fact, I wish anyone would do that. I've had detailed plans of what a service like that would look like for over two years, and no time to take a stab at it myself. If someone here is actually interested, feel free to contact me.
Let's not make it appear easier than it really is. Email is hard. Mailing lists are even harder. There's a lot of non-obvious things you have to know about email before you even start to tackle things like these and on top of it you have to handle spam, registration/security, moderation, etc. It's a lot of hard, dirty problems.
But like a lot of successful people will tell you, if you want to be successful too, solve the dirty problems.
Why does it have to be a mailing list? Can a software project communicate with an interface platform more like HN/Reddit? For that matter, could you use a subreddit for the purpose without obviously violating Reddit's TOS?
Some do. It depends on the nature of the development. Mailing lists are a very popular format. One of the other projects I manage communicates near-exclusively through IRC. But good mailing lists have the main feature of topic-centered discussion, usable with just an email address (very low barrier of entry, easy to add new people to the conversation, easy to continue a topic in private).
Voting isn't generally a feature you want for discussions - voting provides visibility over a short period of time, and then the topic dies off, which is a very big issue with reddit-likes being used for discussion. Newcomers to a highly popular topic are on equal footing with the rest of the participants, while on Reddit/HN the topic is overwhelmed and only the highly popular, old comments get visibility.
This is very suitable if you don't want everyone to have equal footing. For example, discussions centered around video games, politics, social issues, etc. For open source it tends to be bad. This is an off-topic meta-discussion I'd love to take further, in private, if only it'd take me a click to do so. :)
Then there is the spam. Once targeted the spam can get really bad. Meteor JS suffered this and moved to the open source forum software http://www.discourse.org.
I have a bunch of minor projects on SF, which I'm now going to look into moving, and yes, migrating the mailing list is the hard part. Project hosting on my own server is easy; mailing list hosting is not. (I used to run my own mailing lists. Never, ever, again.)
One option is to migrate away from mailing lists and towards something like a forum; but forums, while they provide very low barrier-to-entry, produce a fundamentally terrible user experience. (Yes, including HN. This text box I'm typing into is an embarrassment.)
What I'd really like, I suppose, is a service which provides an easy-to-use web forum with an SMTP gateway for those people who hate forums. And then have it all hosted via my project website so that I don't have to redirect people to some dubious third pary site. Bet I'm not going to find one, though...
> I have read and agree to the above terms , and agree that if I ask FreeLists for email addresses or send SPAM using their resources, they have permission to inflict severe pain on me with large, blunt objects.
FreeLists is a great, "no bullshit" service. It's ran by a geek friend/ex-co-worker of mine. The only "caveat" is that everything must be public (i.e. no private/closed lists).
If your project uses GPL-compatible licenses, then you can use gna.org [1]. Unfortunately the website is a bit old fashioned and git isn't supported for version control, but it's fine for web and mail hosting for Free software.
Zero screenshots or anything of the kind. When I want a demo, I don't want to take extra steps just to be able to look at that demo, I just want to take a look right now.
Those prices are really high too for what it presents itself doing. And I don't care about all the people talking about how awesome it is, really I don't. Show me the sausage.
If this project wants to go anywhere it's going to have to severely review its strategy.
Based on the pricing it doesn't look like this is aiming to be a replacement for mailman or majordomo public mailing lists, but more for internal private lists.
150 members before you're in the "if you have to ask you can't afford it" bracket -- even small, niche projects would have more people than that subscribed to the announce list -- and that's $129/month. You could run a majordomo list with no member limits on a VPS for less than $10/month.
>I am urging everyone who still has projects on Sourceforge to do the same.
Where is that other great free service which hosts large binary assets, web sites, wikis, forums, and trackers i.e. everything you need for a project.
Github is only a solution for software without meaningful binary assets where the user is expected to build the software himself and no community interaction beyond pull requests and issue reports is desired.
There is no free alternative to SF for many users, that is the problem. And well, "free", that is the key word here, at the end of the day SF has to make money somehow. As a non-paying SF user I cannot really complain about ads.
> Github is only a solution for software without meaningful binary assets where the user is expected to build the software himself and no community interaction beyond pull requests and issue reports is desired.
GitHub Releases addresses this (i.e you can release compiled binary assets as your "release", rather than just an archive of the repository). Also, GitHub Pages is pretty useful if you want to build a user-facing site for your project.
Ad-supported business models are OK when the website is view-driven. When the site is download-driven, web ads will never make up for the bandwidth costs, so you'll often end up with sites distributing adware to make up for it (target the area of your product that is actually being used).
So this is a broken model that Sourceforge entered itself into. You absolutely can and should complain that a service has a broken business model resulting in a horrible user experience.
It seems like the obvious business model for SourceForge is to allow you get rid of ads with a LinkedIn account, then charge recruiters and tech companies looking for active developers or tech savvy individuals.
I'm not sure if that model would make people happier.
Software distribution used to be done via FTP sites, separate from the project web pages, documentation, issue tracker, etc. iBiblio [0] will still host stuff for distribution. There's also Savannah.nongnu.org [1] which is an old fork of the SF code.
Github is only a solution for software without meaningful binary assets where the user is expected to build the software himself and no community interaction beyond pull requests and issue reports is desired.
I have no experience with them, but I've seen some projects using Bintray:
For binary assets, why not just rent a cheap digital ocean box? You get a 20GB server for $5/mo.
Throw up an nginx install to forward part of the site to github, and downloads direct from disk, and you have a nice - and fully customizable - project setup.
Given that the parent company of SF.net was recently purchased by Hot Topic, of all companies (presumably primarily for ThinkGeek), I doubt SF.net is long for this world.
Edit: doh, I didn't realize they had been sold off already. Never mind. :)
Once again reposting what I said in the other thread (which seems to have been modded off the frontpage, sad).
I'm one of the lead devs of LXQt and an LXDE sysadmin. We use Sourceforge for our mailing lists and some LXDE legacy stuff.
I'm absolutely sick of them. It's not the first time this has happened. I've been pushing for us to move off SF for a while and this is a good occasion to push for it harder.
I've sent an email [1] detailing plans to move. I am urging everyone who still has projects on Sourceforge to do the same.
If you have similar migration problems to solve as the ones I've highlighted in the email, please contact me directly and we can share the workload. My email is available on my Github profile [2].
[1] http://sourceforge.net/p/lxde/mailman/message/34148903/ [2] https://github.com/jleclanche