Show HN: Effort to clone unmaintained SourceForge projects to GitHub(a-sf-mirror.github.io) |
Show HN: Effort to clone unmaintained SourceForge projects to GitHub(a-sf-mirror.github.io) |
In 10 years time, Github may be the tired old service that gets acquired by a hedge fund that decides to monetize their repos. Such things are part of the corporate lifecycle.
So fix it in 10 years. Git makes that easy.
Point me to a good alternative to github that matches all your ideals. A free alternative to github - free as in beer, unless you're willing to fund this effort yourself, of course?
We migrated one of our projects from Sourceforge to Github, and all the stallmen came out of their rock to tell us how Github is evil, how Savannah is the only true alternative, pah. "Absolute freedom of software" is nice but it's not the only requirement. Savannah has the usability of a rusty wrench and will probably shut down without warning long before Github "turns evil".
Some people are just so far detached from reality when suggesting that stuff isn't perfect. Github is pretty damn amazing. If you want to use foss alternative like Gitlab, more power to you, but that doesn't make them ideal in every situation.
Gitlab? Savannah (of the nongnu.org variety)? Bitbucket? Gitorious? A basic VPS with SSH and git?
Do you mean git?
At least with a commercial entity there is a bit more "trust" involved that they won't disappear out of the blue one day. And if the time comes that Github starts to collapse, the process can be repeated.
Just because something isn't permanent doesn't mean it's pointless.
Archive.org ?
And weird that nobody suggested the Bitcoin block chain. I don't think binaries are a good fit but source code doesn't require a lot of space. With the current and future block size it will take sometime to make it happen.
My company uses GitHub Enterprise. Unless we have some sort of deal/discount above the built-in, we're paying over $30,000/year for it and we run it on our own servers. I'm guessing a lot of other companies do as well. Developers are quite used to using both git and GitHub and $30,000 is nothing if you have a hundred developers costing you $150k a piece (not just salary, but computers, benefits, desks/office space, payroll taxes, etc).
SorceForge counted on their open-source stance limiting who would use their service and, by extension, limiting the resources they would need to serve those people. GitHub works the opposite way. They want everyone to think of GitHub as "the place I put stuff". Have a code snippet? Stick it on GitHub! Want a basic wiki for something vaguely code related? Create a GitHub repo just for the wiki! Collaborating with friends on a class project? GitHub! And then, years later, GitHub feels like second-nature to you and you love it when employers are using it paying GitHub tens of thousands a year for it.
I'm not accusing GitHub of doing something nefarious to lock people into GitHub. Just noting that GitHub feels very familiar and that makes GitHub a very reasonable choice for companies who pay them money. Without that familiarity, the value of GitHub isn't the same. If you're a company spending millions per year, $30k is a drop in the bucket for software your developers are already familiar with and software that works well, is well supported, and can handle your problem.
Yes, GitLab exists and has both open-source and enterprise versions, but I'm not sure that a business feels that differently about $5,000/year for a 100 person team and $25,000. I'm glad GitLab exists, I'm glad Bitbucket exists. They'll make sure that GitHub has to continue being great and they'll provide services to people that want something a bit different. But GitHub's business model seems pretty sound. The more people use GitHub for free, the more likely high-rollers are to pay for GitHub.
I mean, the GitHub subscription per developer costs less than the additional money my company pays for Apple gear for developers. By targeting open source with a premium, free, non-ad driven product, GitHub opened the door to lucrative business sales. They seem like a sustainable business and it even seems like the free, open-source repositories are part of that business plan.
I'm not saying that Apple gear is so overpriced or that it isn't a better platform to develop on, but we don't need retina displays to do our work. And many people argue that you don't want to force devs to work on a platform they're less productive on. The same applies to GitHub. If your devs are more productive or, heck, even happier or more comfortable using it, $250/year isn't something a company is going to blink at if it's paying $150k+ per dev - just as the company won't mind paying an extra $100, $500, or $1,000 in equipment for that dev.
(During the past week I paid for the first month of private github hosting on my personal CC for the company I work for. Will get it re-imbursed and transition it to some company CC when I get the time.)
If that happens, the projects can be re-hosted somewhere else. For the time being Github is the best option.
Sometimes the hypothetical situations free software people bring up hurt their cause more than they help.
I'd also echo the concerns of others about GitHub.
Proper archivists should do for SourceForge what they did for other projects. Archive Team, maybe? Looks like they have a wiki page: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=SourceForge
Right now Xfire's videos, several URL shortners' links, and Toshiba Support material are being archived. If you have spare cycles and bandwidth, and want to contribute, running an instance of the "ArchiveTeam Warrior" is pretty easy through docker or a VM. http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Warrior
So the mirrors should just cut the upload write permission for Sourceforge and transfer it over to archive.org or ArchiveTeam.
I think you're taking the right approach by capturing the code and the history. In fact, I think you're going above and beyond what most people should ask for or expect.
http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Fire_Drill
Update: seems others have linked to archiveteam.org, so maybe that's the best route. Is the OP part of the AT effort or do they know about each other? Maybe they should.
[1]: http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=SourceForge
The best place to pop in is probably on IRC. For the Sourceforge project it's #coldstorage on EFnet, http://chat.efnet.org:9090/?nick=&channels=%23coldstorage&Lo... for the web client. Though note, the ArchiveTeam project seems to be paused right now.
Gitlab has a community edition, and then there's Gogs, Kallithea and a few others.
I agree with what the others are saying, there's a lot of source code for solving obscure programs that is only on Sourceforge.
One example I found recently is a program called QLumEdit. I recently had to figure out how to work with EuLumdat files, and if it wasn't for the source code for this program on Sourceforge I would have been completely stumped (well not quite, but it would have taken me ages).
If SF goes down the toilet, a lot of knowledge goes with it so this is awesome to see!
If anybody is interested, I was converting this code from C++ to .net, my horrible hacky unrefactored effort is here - https://github.com/bumblebeeman/eulum.net
I am planning to make this code nicer, and develop it into a WPF app when I have time!
I am getting pretty close too, here is my .net generated version of the images this program produces: http://imgur.com/PCmpnJ2
For CVS, though, I suspect cvs-fast-export [1] will do a better job than git-cvsimport.
This would dramatically increase the odds that the content is never lost.
Please add "SVN" (Subversion)
Note 2: If their business model is offering popular binaries and source, they can just copy these from other sites and repackage them. Open source software allows you to do this. If no one else is interesting in bundling and monetizing, then they can buy traffic and still succeed.
Note 3: Remember that academy award winning movie from 1943? Not so great it today's light. While perhaps one of the goals of the Internet and cheap storage is to keep a copy of everything, and its often better to not re-invent the wheel, if something fall by the wayside, and its needed, it will be created.
Note 4: There are plenty of websites which catalog useful abandonware, that someone had to find a physical disk drive from. If the software has value, chances are someone will eventually repost it somewhere without a massive organized effort.
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There is clearly value in moving over some project to GitHub or elsewhere, but if some things are not migrated or moved life will go on.
Even with all this development, I doubt we will be able to have everything on Github locally on our computers. I imagine the typical Github project to be tiny -- probably tens of megabytes at the most so I'd say we can have all the projects that we care about available locally. One can only care about so much.
Also, SVN is a lot more annoying to copy, especially if you want the whole history. Not that it isn't doable, but it's pretty slow and obnoxious. With Git, every clone includes everything by default.
http://sourceforge.net/p/forge/documentation/Join%20as%20a%2...
http://sourceforge.net/p/forge/documentation/Mirrors/
I bet at least one techie working at one of those organisations would lend a sympathetic ear to the effort, if you could find them
edit: running 'rsync -r' on a local mirror shows 512,000 directories from a..ju, but only 43k files. Mirroring all the downloads should be easy
I said: With the current and future block size it will take sometime to make it happen.
The implicit free-as-in-speech condition is adequately fulfilled by other alternatives, like (as I mentioned) Gitlab and (IIRC) GNU Savannah (along with - again - just installing git on an SSH-able server).
The reason we went to Github rather than Sourceforge is because of the community. Nethertheless, I think it's fairly foolish to focus on the platform (in the case here of archiving) - it's just a host. Stuff goes on domain 1 instead of domain 2. In either case it's still open source, the archives are all there, git is decentralized and perfect for the job.
Is it just an archive or isn't it? If it is, what's so important about the community, then?
It's fine that you chose what you did, of course. It's just that that in your defending it, you can't seem to decide whether you want to have your cake or eat it.
If you wanted, this would have been a perfectly fine reason to give: "We went with GitHub because it's just what we use mostly, and other stuff not so much."
1. The meat of which remains: if it's just an archive and the host is only being used as dumb storage, how is the "community" aspect of it a plus?