Those who forget history often inadvertently repeat it. Some of us recall that twenty-one years ago, the most popular code hosting site, a fully Free and Open Source (FOSS)
site called SourceForge, proprietarized all their code — never to make it FOSS again. Major FOSS projects slowly left
SourceForge since it was now, itself, a proprietary system, and antithetical to FOSS. FOSS communities learned that it was a mistake to allow a for-profit, proprietary
software company to become the dominant FOSS collaborative development site. SourceForge slowly collapsed after the DotCom crash,
and today, SourceForge still refuses to solve these problems0. We learned a valuable lesson that was a bit too easy to forget — especially when corporate involvement manipulates
FOSS communities to its own ends. We now must learn the SourceForge lesson again with Microsoft's GitHub.
You must log in or register to comment.