<story><title>How GitHub replaced SourceForge as the dominant code hosting platform</title><url>https://graphite.dev/blog/github-monopoly-on-code-hosting</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>markphip</author><text>Something this misses is that the mentality of OSS was just different before GitHub.&lt;p&gt;The thought from the original growth of OSS was that it would be more about the community than the code. So OSS would be a series of communities that would each have their own &amp;quot;identity&amp;quot; for their community. There were big OSS foundations like Apache and Eclipse. Sun had several like java.net, OpenOffice.org and netbeans.org. Gnome had their own place etc.&lt;p&gt;Like Sun, other enterprises like HP, Oracle and IBM were setting up their own communities for their projects and to collaborate with partners.&lt;p&gt;And then as the post touches on there were sites like SourceForge, Tigris.org, Google Code and Microsoft had something too (CodePlex?). These sites were places projects might spin up if they did not belong at one of the other foundations and wanted a place to host their code for free. Of these SourceForge was often used for distribution of binaries due to its vast mirror network and often that was all that was hosted there and the project was elsewhere.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, until GitHub sprang up and started to consolidate all the OSS in one place, I do not think anyone else was even really trying to do this. Obviously the rise of git played a big role in this. This change fueled the growth of OSS but it did kind of come at the cost of losing out on some of the community aspects that existed before in the mailing lists and forums of these other places. Now collaboration all happens in PR&amp;#x27;s and Issue and is often just between a small handful of people.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pimlottc</author><text>I think this is a good point, and also part of the larger trend of Internet activity moving to centralized providers. Users are now habituated to look for an existing platform to host their content, whether that&amp;#x27;s video (YouTube&amp;#x2F;Tiktok), blog posts (Medium&amp;#x2F;Substack), hot takes (X&amp;#x2F;Threads) or code (Github).  It doesn&amp;#x27;t even occur to most people that there&amp;#x27;s another way to do it.  They see these companies as just part of the public infrastructure of the Internet.</text></comment>
<story><title>How GitHub replaced SourceForge as the dominant code hosting platform</title><url>https://graphite.dev/blog/github-monopoly-on-code-hosting</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>markphip</author><text>Something this misses is that the mentality of OSS was just different before GitHub.&lt;p&gt;The thought from the original growth of OSS was that it would be more about the community than the code. So OSS would be a series of communities that would each have their own &amp;quot;identity&amp;quot; for their community. There were big OSS foundations like Apache and Eclipse. Sun had several like java.net, OpenOffice.org and netbeans.org. Gnome had their own place etc.&lt;p&gt;Like Sun, other enterprises like HP, Oracle and IBM were setting up their own communities for their projects and to collaborate with partners.&lt;p&gt;And then as the post touches on there were sites like SourceForge, Tigris.org, Google Code and Microsoft had something too (CodePlex?). These sites were places projects might spin up if they did not belong at one of the other foundations and wanted a place to host their code for free. Of these SourceForge was often used for distribution of binaries due to its vast mirror network and often that was all that was hosted there and the project was elsewhere.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, until GitHub sprang up and started to consolidate all the OSS in one place, I do not think anyone else was even really trying to do this. Obviously the rise of git played a big role in this. This change fueled the growth of OSS but it did kind of come at the cost of losing out on some of the community aspects that existed before in the mailing lists and forums of these other places. Now collaboration all happens in PR&amp;#x27;s and Issue and is often just between a small handful of people.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asveikau</author><text>I recall that sourceforge gave you an SVN repo and an issue tracker, so it was kind of a hub for running your project. What made GitHub stand out was easy forking, and the pull request code review UI, and slick source history UI. A lot of this was aided by the technical innovation of using git and making git such a central piece.</text></comment>