I don&#x27;t remember it being awesome, ever, just less crappy than the alternatives. It was like a bit of flotsam in an ocean, better than fending for yourself, marginally. You could roll your own hosting, but it was obnoxious and expensive. SourceForge was, at best, the Geocities of open-source hosting.<p>It really hasn&#x27;t improved much since then.<p>Also a lot of people still use PHP. I really don&#x27;t know where you get your numbers. It&#x27;s just that there&#x27;s no longer just PHP or Perl, there&#x27;s dozens of languages that are in play, but the number of PHP devs is surely way higher than when SourceForge launched.