Our open source MSS API Laverca has been on SourceForge since 2011. We decided to move out of SourceForge in the wake of recent events. SourceForge has definitely been going downhill for a while now but this was the last straw for us.

We decided to move to GitHub since it seems to be the largest open source platform today.

GitHub’s benefits compared to SourceForge:

• Improved collaboration with pull requests
  • Promotes social coding
• Visibility with a more popular platform

What we lose:

• Old forum posts
• Bug tracker entries
  • We manually migrated the open entries
• Download history

Sourceforge used SVN. Compared to SVN, Git has these attributes:

• Better branching
• Easier forking
• Decentralized repository
• More complicated
• Annoying version numbering

All in all we gain a lot more than we lose with the transfer.

Earlier concerns

We have been considering moving to GitHub for years. GitHub supports pull requests that allow third parties to contribute code. In Sourceforge we had to use SVN patch files, which are a terrible way to manage software.

One of the major reasons we didn’t move earlier was GitHub’s removal of uploads. We wanted to provide easy-to-use releases. Not being able to upload releases meant that our users would be forced to build the software before using it.

However, GitHub later introduced the releases feature. Now we are able to publish built releases in GitHub.