I mean, that's just when they did it fairly deliberately.
Regardless, I think you would be hard pressed to argue SF was a great hosting environment when Google Code launched, which was the point.
>hard pressed to argue SF was a great hosting environment when Google Code launched
But SF had FTP, Websites, SVN hosting and i think even a WIKI, so you can hardly compare it with Google-Code...and hey at least they opensource'd their "forge":
SourceForge was originally open source, but they later closed it. GNU Savannah (https://savannah.gnu.org/) runs on a fork of the last open version of SourceForge.
I do wish there were enough incentive to have a strong commercial gerrit offering. There are some very good ideas in gerrit, and it would have strong differentiation vs github-styled offerings.
Not just because I like gerrit, but because the github monoculture is wearing on me.
At that point, SF was serving malware and stuff. It was really not a great time.
Github became a monoculture years later when others folded. Google code was shut down in 2016. Github wasn't quite a monoculture then.
I also said, back in 2014, that it might be necessary to do something like google code again in 5-10 years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8605689
10 years later, here we are i guess :)
Though i think what i said then still holds - Github is not anywhere near as bad or unreliable as SF was.