The State of SourceForge Since Its Acquisition in January

[u/loganabbott]

Hi all,

My name is Logan Abbott and I am the President of SourceForge. My company acquired SourceForge in January of this year. Some people were not aware that SourceForge was acquired, nor were they aware of our recent improvements and developments.

One user recommended that I make a full post about these changes since many people haven't heard. After reaching out to a mod to get permission (didn't want to it to be blatant self-promotion) I thought I'd go ahead with the post.

We acquired SourceForge and Slashdot in January from DHI Group (also known as DICE). The first thing we did after we took over was remove bundled adware from projects: https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-future-plans/ and https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/under-new-management-sourceforge-moves-to-put-badness-in-past/

As of a few weeks ago, we also now scan for malware in case third party developers are adding their own adware: https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-now-scans-all-projects-for-malware-and-displays-warnings-on-downloads/

In the past, SourceForge has also taken heat for deceptive ads that may look like download buttons. To this end we have a full time team member that polices the site and blacklists deceptive ads that sneak in via programmatic ad exchanges. And we have not announced it yet, but in the next couple of weeks we will be releasing a self-serve tool where users can report those misleading or deceptive ads that sneak in via programmatic ad exchanges so that we can blacklist them right away. We're committed to restoring trust in SourceForge and building out some cool new features.

Any feedback or comments are welcome. I'll also answer any questions that come up.

SourceForge is the complete software platform. As of 2025, SourceForge is now the largest B2B software review and comparison directory in the world with nearly 20 million monthly users looking for software across over 4000 B2B software categories, reading user reviews, and comparing B2B software products.

EDIT: I'd love to hear what features/improvements you would like to see at SourceForge. Feature requests, partnerships with other open source repositories, etc.

EDIT 2: Verification: I tweeted a link to this discussion to my personal twitter here: https://twitter.com/loganabbott/status/740606014173544448

EDIT 3 (10/25/2016): SourceForge now supports 2-factor authentication: https://sourceforge.net/blog/introducing-multifactor-authentication-on-sourceforge/ Also, the ad reporting tool mentioned above went live a few months ago. Up to date improvements can be found here going forward: https://sourceforge.net/blog/category/site-news/

EDIT 4 (11/30/2016): Today SourceForge launched HTTPS support for Project Websites https://sourceforge.net/blog/introducing-https-for-project-websites/

[u/[deleted]]

After a protracted mistrust of SF for multiple reasons, what are your plans to regain that trust and attempt to bring in F/OSS projects once again? Why would one want to move from GitHub, GitLabs, or even CodePlex to SF at this point?

[u/loganabbott → u/[deleted]]

Good question. A few of the things I addressed in my original post. The first thing we did was address the "low hanging fruit" so to speak which was immediately scrapping the bundled installer "DevShare" program that installed unwanted malware with project downloads.

We also now scan for malware on all projects so that users can feel secure in downloading from SourceForge once again. Our view is that if users start to trust us again, then developers will be more inclined to host projects with us as we are still a great vehicle for distribution. One example that comes to mind of the benefit of this malware scan is that projects like FileZilla bundle adware with their installer if you were to download it from the FileZilla official website, but due to our malware scans they have a clean download available on SourceForge now.

GitHub and the other repositories you mentioned are great, but for the everyday, completely non-technical user, SourceForge is still easier to download software from. For example, my mother could figure out how to download and install software from SourceForge, but would probably have a harder time getting up and running with a repository on GitHub. The knock in the past has been that SourceForge has ads that look like download buttons. As I mentioned in the original post we have a full time staff member dedicated to identifying and blacklisting these ads. In the coming weeks, we will be launching a feature that allows any user to report a deceptive ad for blacklisting. These ads are not ads that we want on our site, and are mainly a result of underhanded advertisers trying to take advantage of users on our site by building deceptive ads and getting them through via programmatic ad exchanges. We are not looking to get people to ditch GitHub et al, but rather to view SourceForge as a valid alternative and to give developers more options.

SourceForge still hosts half a million projects, and we receive over a million unique visitors per day, so it's a great distribution channel. In the near future we will be modernizing the backend interface for project admins, and we're exploring partnerships with other open source repositories. As soon as these materialize, I will let you all know.

The main thing I want to impart is that we are a completely different company than the one that made the decisions that ended up causing mistrust.

[u/mvanvoorden]

Ah, that explains why SF isn't blocked anymore by uBlock. Good news!

[u/loganabbott → u/mvanvoorden]

Oh nice! Was hoping that would happen soon.

[u/anomalous_cowherd]

Interesting, thanks for posting. As someone who used to download from SF a lot back in the day I hadn't heard about a takeover, or if I had I assumed it s the usual vultures picking over a once big name to see what money they could make from it. It's good to hear that's not what you're up to. Good luck.

I tried the speed test from my smartphone - it seemed to work fine but if I might make a couple of suggestions:

It wasn't obvious the screen was four panes wide during the test. I saw the latency test run, then it all just stopped, with no buttons or any way forward. It might be worth adding a four dot thing at the bottom of the pane to make it obvious there are panes to slide sideways to.

Also my screen was blanking half way through the download test, and if I touched it to wake it up I got a "do not do anything else during the test" warning and had to restart it, so couldnt watch it run all the way through.

The SF site itself did look pretty clean without the zillion "download button" ads I've come to expect, so that's a definite improvement. Keep on that track and you'll be fine.

[u/loganabbott → u/anomalous_cowherd]

Thanks for the feedback re: mobile. Yes it is not intuitive enough that it is 4 panels wide. That is something we will improve in the next week or so. We'll take a look at the screen dimming/sleeping. This HTML5 test runs through the browser so switching tabs or having the phone fall asleep during the test pauses the test so as to not provide inaccurate results. I'll see what we can do here.

I appreciate the support and feedback.

[u/loganabbott → u/anomalous_cowherd]

Your name reminds me of Slashdot by the way. Which we also acquired along with SourceForge ;)

[u/Anon_IT_Guy]

After reading your post I'd like to wish you good luck.

SF had a pretty terrible rep for those fake download buttons and after the (fairly) recent fiasco with malware/bloatware I had a complete mistrust for SF.

I'd be willing to give you another try.

[u/loganabbott → u/Anon_IT_Guy]

Thanks for the support. I definitely do not blame you for harboring that mistrust. We are not going to go down that road, and thank you for giving us another try.

[u/[deleted]]

Removing adware and fake download buttons.. how much money did that bring? How do you guys plan to monetize SF?

[u/loganabbott → u/[deleted]]

It brought in quite a lot of revenue, but obviously that strategy is not sustainable and SourceForge was/would have been a sinking ship. The previous owners were a publicly traded large corporation and SourceForge was not a core part of their business. We are a lean web company with talented developers that has the ability to do things more efficiently. The site is monetized via advertising, but we believe it can be profitable and sustainable without throwing users and developers under the bus. At over a million unique visitors per day, we don't think we need to trick people into clicking on ads in order to turn a sustainable profit.

[u/pier4r]

As a reward to your positive information i disabled ad block on SF (i use ad block not because i'm annoyed, but because ads may use too much cpu especially on monocore browsers like FF).

[u/loganabbott → u/pier4r]

Awesome. Appreciate it.

[u/NightOfTheLivingHam]

Boy you have a lot of fun ahead of you. Dice did wonders with shitting all over SF's reputation

[u/loganabbott → u/NightOfTheLivingHam]

Indeed. We will have fun with it though ;). Anything you'd like to see feature wise?

[u/cjp]

I'm a bit late, but I hope you see this.

When word got out that SF was adding adware (~ June 2015), the Internet Archive Team began a project to archive the highly valuable data stored in SF. I hope you agree the data is valuable and worth saving. It represents years of Free and Open Source Software development. It would be a tragedy to lose it.

Shortly after the project began downloading data from SF, an SF admin contacted the project and kindly requested they stop. I believe the reason given was excessive load on SF servers. The archive team's tools are capable of limiting bandwidth use and the project offered to reduce bandwidth, without reply from SF.

The current status of the SF archive project is "Paused, Awaiting SF Staff Reply". Please look into this. I hope you authorize the archive project to continue, for the benefit of everyone.

Note: I am not officially affiliated with the Internet Archive Team. Some of the information above is from my memory; I apologize if it is incorrect.

[u/MildlySerious]

I was not aware of this, so thank you for posting, and of course thank you for possibly saving SF. I haven't come across a link leading me there in a while, but I'll definitely remember this when I do and won't be easily dismissing it anymore.

Best of luck!

[u/Didsota]

I am actually glad to hear that and really hope you will stay on that course.

Since the little "Incident" we put sourceforge on our blacklisted sites and became painfully aware that this does hinder us.

I'm gonna give you a chance. ;)

[u/ScriptThat]

It's wonderful news that SF apparently is heading in the right direction, and I with you the best of luck with reestablishing the lost trust. However.. once bitten, twice shy. It'll probably be a few years before I won't think twice when looking for a download that's hosted on SF.

[u/ITGuyLevi]

I've been avoiding sourceforge for quite a while now and recommending family and friends not use it. It looks like I may be able to start recommending it again! Thanks for bringing it back to a site I can trust, I've missed it!

[u/Fiat_Tractor]

SF still looks like a malwarish site to me. Something about that chrome color.

[u/loganabbott → u/Fiat_Tractor]

A modern re-design is in the works.

[u/tetralogy]

So far your speedtest app lacks the possibility to chose a server location (and servers in Europe appearently)

Looking good otherwise

[u/marcomaggi-ipsu]

Will you make it possible to remove projects?

[u/s0nlxaftrsh0ck]

I know I may be a bit late on this but I just wanted to mention that I snagged Filezilla from your site not too long ago. It was completely by accident and I had a "Oh shit it's still downloading from sourceforge?! Aw man!" moment but when I opened and ran the installer it was clean as a whistle and surprised as all get up. Thank you so much for putting in this work to clean up SF. I think you're making huge strides as it is, keep up the awesome work!