Free, supported and turnkey.<p>Pre-sourceforge, you had to hustle and find a host or pay for it, build a web site, setup a mailing list on it, build all the infrastructure from scratch.  Back it up, maintain it, etc..  Bigger projects had an easier job of those things, they&#x27;d even have volunteers to do the work.  It says nothing of smaller projects or how you started a new project.<p>Sf dramatically reduced the friction to get things going.  Then they also supported different tooling, cvs, svn, others, they had build and test servers, if you want to see if your stuff builds right on alpha running Debian or something else you didn&#x27;t have access to, they provided that.  They invented free code hosting, made tons of mistakes trying to monetize it but at least the first few years their heart was in a good place.<p>Plurality is good with this stuff, I don&#x27;t know if it will be good or bad, but github will be different in five years.