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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 is more advertising link-bait than it is code hosting. 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.
How does that contradict the usefulness of mailing lists in context of software development? It’s not a chat for anything but specifically discussing contributions, thus not any worse than discussion boards below PRs.
maybe it doesn’t.