Timeline of SourceForge's decline
Following the SourceForge adware controversy (see How SourceForge started spreading adware), I think it’s particularly interesting to plot the site’s gradual decline.
Timeline
- Nov 1999: SourceForge founded.
- Oct 2004: GIMP for Windows moves to SourceForge.
- 30 Sep 2006: SourceForge revenue reported $6.49 million. (Source: MarketWatch)
- 30 Apr 2007: SourceForge revenue reported $10.3 million. (Source: MarketWatch)
- 8 Feb 2008: GitHub founded.
- 2009: SourceForge reports gross quarterly income of US$23m.
- 2010: VLC media player moves its download hosting to SourceForge.
- 7 Jul 2011: VideoLAN complains of other sites distributing versions of VLC media player with adware/malware.
- 3 Nov 2011: SourceForge Open Source Mirror System creates dummy project pages to host downloads of open source projects that don’t use SourceForge. Promises to never use adware, install wrappers or other malware, a promise it would eventually break. Creates accounts sf-editor1, sf-editor2 and sf-editor3 to manage the dummy project pages.
- 2 Dec 2011: SourceForge claims 324,000 projects, 46 million consumers and more than 4m downloads per day.
- 2011: SourceForge, Slashdot and Freecode reportedly generate $20m annual revenue. (Source: GeekNet)
- 5 Jan 2012: SourceForge claims more than 40 million users per month.
- 2012: SourceForge increases the amount of third-party advertising on the site. VideoLAN repeatedly complains that their download page shows ads masquerading as the VLC download button, which lead to sites offering malware-infected copies of VLC. Failing to block these ads, SourceForge begins paying VideoLAN a share of the ad revenue amounting to thousands of dollars per month.
- 18 Sep 2012: Dice Holdings buys SourceForge along with FreeCode and Slashdot for US$20m. SourceForge reportedly has 40m unique visitors each month. (Source: GeekNet)
- 11 Apr 2013: SourceForge is serving as many as 6.7 million downloads of VLC per week, around 10% of SourceForge total downloads and its most popular project at the time. It continues to fail to remove misleading advertising. In response, VideoLAN is has begun moving off SourceForge to their own hosting service.
- 23 April 2013: VLC’s new hosting is targeted by a DDOS attack.
- 2 May 2013: SourceForge still promises not to include adware or malware.
- 1 Jul 2013: SourceForge launches DevShare, a project to insert adware into downloads. It promises to be strictly opt-in and to share revenue with project developers. Some projects, such as FileZilla, have already opted in.
- 12 Sep 2013: SourceForge Open Source Mirror Directory has amended its no-adware promise by this date. It no longer considers adware to be malware, and no longer promises not to modify downloads.
- 5 Nov 2013: GIMP declines SourceForge’s offer to join DevShare and officially stops hosting Windows downloads at SourceForge due to misleading ads.
- 14 Nov 2013: SourceForge announces its BlockThis initiative to handle misleading advertising. Only 3 projects have opted into DevShare. SourceForge promises never to include alware without the consent of the project developer, a promise it would later break.
- 23 Dec 2013: GitHub passes 10 million repositories.
- 10 Feb 2014: By this date, SourceForge has deleted the section promising promising not to provide malware in its downloads. Now claims over 42 million visitors.
- 1 Jan 2015: SourceForge boasts 430,000 projects, 41.8m customers and 4.8m downloads per day.
- 12 Mar 2015: Google announces plans to shut down Google Code, disables creation of new projects.
- 21 Mar 2015: SourceForge has not yet taken over abandoned projects by this date.
- 22 Apr 2015: By this date, SourceForge Open Mirror Directory has expanded to take over popular former SourceForge projects which left the site, such as VLC and GIMP for Windows. Some projects have malware embedded despite earlier assurances that the adware system would be purely opt-in.
- 16 May 2015: GIMP developer asks SourceForge to remove gimp-win from the site. They don’t. SourceForge later claims they didn’t receive this message.
- 28 May 2015: After much negative publicity, SourceForge announces it has stopped embedding adware in GIMP for Windows.
- 1 June 2015: SourceForge announces it has stopped including adware in its mirrors of abandoned projects.