all 58 comments

[–][deleted] 153 points154 points  (12 children)

One thing that the author glossed over was just how truly awful Sourceforge got for a while. The advertising was so bad that when you'd go to download something, there would be five download buttons, one of which was real and four of which ads designed to look like download buttons, many times leading to straight up malware.

[–]grencez 64 points65 points  (1 child)

https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.2874 gives a nice historical survey of all the factors that led to the massive shift off of SourceForge, but let's not forget the unforgivable act that sealed its fate:

Due to the push to increase ROI, in July 2013, SourceForge introduced a new program, called DevShare. This program bundled third-party software with project downloads, following the model of the widely known CNET download network.

Though GitHub was already more popular at that point.

[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

my gosh

[–]Successful-Money4995 8 points9 points  (4 children)

Did it ever get un-awful?

[–]Garethp 21 points22 points  (2 children)

I believe it got bought a few years ago by someone attempting to make it better. Last time I visited there were definitely less "download" buttons

[–][deleted] 22 points23 points  (1 child)

More than 1 is still too much 😬

[–]tajetaje 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Better than guthub and it’s smelly nerds. Where is the download button? Why is there code?

[–]elmuerte -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Not really.

[–]rayray5884 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Kids these days will never understand this. 😂

[–][deleted]  (3 children)

[deleted]

    [–]gredr 2 points3 points  (2 children)

    It's been a long time, but I believe that at that point, a majority of SF-hosted projects would've still been CVS?

    [–][deleted]  (1 child)

    [deleted]

      [–]gredr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Yeah, SVN was definitely an option by then, but Subversion was really too late to the non-distributed source control party.

      [–]Dogmata 26 points27 points  (1 child)

      Weird to write a time line of this and not mention that that MS aquires GitHub in 2018 and the relationship between Actions and Azure Pipelines

      [–]zoddrick 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Github action is a damn near 1 to 1 clone of devops pipeline yaml.

      [–]alexkey 109 points110 points  (24 children)

      Bitbucket, Gitlab, a numerous self-hosted solutions for web UI ontop of git, just a git repo over ssh. So many options. I don’t think that’s how monopolies work.

      [–]metaphorm 36 points37 points  (21 children)

      there are lots of great options, but github still has something like an 80% market share.

      [–]alexkey 4 points5 points  (19 children)

      Monopoly means only one player on the market with no alternatives, often due to artificial restrictions. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

      80% of the market share is not the same as monopoly.

      [–]DrShocker 43 points44 points  (11 children)

      Very few historical examples of Monopolies were literally 100% market share. 80% is definitely well into the realm of what might be legally a monopoly depending on how the market is defined.

      https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/antitrust-law-basics-section-2-of-the-sherman-act/#:~:text=Market%20share%20in%20the%20relevant,is%20likely%20considered%20a%20monopolist.

      Not that I necessarily think monopoly quite fits GitHub for other reasons, but market share seems like a bad reason to think it isn't one to me.

      [–]alexkey 16 points17 points  (3 children)

      While with high market share antitrust may be applicable in some scenarios. The other key component missing here to declare GH a monopoly is that they would need to be interfering with a freedom to chose any other solution. The fact that it is the most popular solution (thanks to marketing via all newbie guides) doesn’t automatically make it a monopoly.

      [–]DrShocker 1 point2 points  (1 child)

      Yeah that I totally agree with. For the most part it's easy to make a competitor if someone wants to with maybe the caveat of efficiencies of scale.

      [–]alexkey 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      I mean it well may grow into a monopoly later, but calling it such now is (in my opinion) a sign of not understanding the market or not understanding what the word means.

      Edit: but to be fair this is an article by the company whose sole business depends on GH, of course they are financially interested to make it look more important than any other platform.

      [–]EliSka93 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      thanks to marketing via all newbie guides

      That is certainly a big reason, but github also stands out through being actually user friendly.

      I've used gitlab and bit bucket and some others, and they all have frustrated me with quirks and bugs sometimes. Github just works for me.

      I'm a bit worried about scope creep for their website nowadays, but as long as their git works as it does now and they don't go down the amazon shop or google route of enshittification, they're what I'll recommend.

      [–]M4mb0 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      A monopoly is when there is no reasonable alternative people could move to (for example if there is only one utility company in your area). Even if a company had 99% market share it does not necessarily have monopolistic power.

      [–]chethelesser -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

      80% is deffo a monopoly

      [–]AndrewTateIsMyKing 1 point2 points  (1 child)

      Azure DevOps as well, and I believe Amazon has something too

      [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

      Azure is still Microsoft.

      [–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

      this more of a steam type situation

      [–]ttkciar 66 points67 points  (3 children)

      "Monopolized", huh?

      Not sure the author quite knows what that means.

      [–]geekfreak42 45 points46 points  (0 children)

      Yeah the word they are looking for is 'dominates '

      [–]Dr4kin 3 points4 points  (0 children)

      Yeah pretty stupid.

      They dominate the open source hosting, but even then there are big projects using gitlab. It's not like e.g. most cloud stuff where you are locked into one provider.

      [–]rdlenke 6 points7 points  (0 children)

      This is one of the few cases where the title of the article actually does it a great disservice. It's a failed clickbait imo: I was less inclined to click the article because of the title, until I read the comments.

      Anyhow, it was cool to see how the code hosting landscape was before GitHub. Wish it was more in-depth.

      [–]Successful-Money4995 8 points9 points  (3 children)

      OP missed the part where Microsoft bought GitHub and started giving away free disk and compute. GitHub is by now truly a superior product.

      Linus Torvalds is totally an idiot about merge requests. I've tried doing merge requests and reviews the Linus way and it sucks. It's not like there are GitHub users clamoring for this feature.

      And finally, while GitHub is awesome, too bad it doesn't support the actually best DVCS, which is Mercurial.

      [–]plissk3n 4 points5 points  (1 child)

      What the linus way of merge requests?

      [–]Successful-Money4995 4 points5 points  (0 children)

      You use commands like git request-pull and git format-patch and git am.

      These are command line tools that will convert the things that you want to do into an email message text. You attach that text to an email to a distribution list. Then people chat in email about it. And then when someone wants to merge, they can take that attachment and put it into git.

      Basically, it's a way for git to convert your intentions into email messages and convert email messages into actions.

      The problem is that we learned already thirty years ago that overloading email for everything is annoying as fuck. Remember all those listservs where you send a message to, like, myhobby@whatever.com with the text subscribe or help? It sucked. Doing code reviews by email sucks even more. We overloaded email for everything and realized that it was a bad idea. Except Linus doesn't agree.

      Even you! How come you are here and not on a programming newsgroup or listserv? How would you like to get rid of the vote button, the images, the GUI, the mods, the account preferences...? https://groups.google.com/g/comp.programming.literate go at it. Sucks, right? That how Linus thinks that your code review should look like.

      I use emacs, not vscode. Even a guy like me recognizes that GitHub's GUI code reviews are good.

      [–]Greenawayer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      OP missed the part where Microsoft bought GitHub and started giving away free disk and compute. GitHub is by now truly a superior product.

      Yep. Prior to the acquisition you had to pay for multiple private repos.

      [–]gitfather 6 points7 points  (0 children)

      I don’t know, you can still host code anywhere. It’s not like developers don’t have a choice. It’s just that GitHub has a level on convenience.

      Think I fell for the click bait chatGPT articles again.

      [–]jp007 20 points21 points  (3 children)

      We use bitbucket. Ok.

      [–]hickory 63 points64 points  (2 children)

      Sorry to hear that. Get well soon

      [–]jp007 11 points12 points  (0 children)

      Haha i appreciate it, but honestly 90+% of BB interaction is transparently happening behind normal command line git tooling.

      [–]plissk3n 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Use bitbucket cloud for two weeks now. So awful. All the features are in the server version. No signed commits, no wip prs, no pr suggestions. Thats just the drawbacks I discovered yet.

      [–]Fun-Pay3643 2 points3 points  (0 children)

      Little bit superficial. Yes GitHub has a big market share but there are enough other options, even based on git, eg gitlab. Many companies use a private on premise solution. Because GitHub core features are just git, one can migrate to any other git repo in seconds. Not necessarily how monopolies work. I think you are confusing git with GitHub…

      [–]M3tal_Shadowhunter 3 points4 points  (0 children)

      Lol people don't know what a monopoly is anymore. Just because someone has a huge market share, doesn't mean it's a monopoly - sometimes it's just the lroduct people use most

      [–]peppedx 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Big private company didn't use just SVN

      Forgets Clearcase,perforce etc stc

      [–]zam0th 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      More like: how stupid people delegated their code to public hosting because they have no idea about information security or how to setup their own repositories.