I was thinking similar thoughts from the other direction - that they have turned to money wringing desperation might mean there is no money to get the thing back up. If the situation turns out to be "it's dead Jim, we need to spend several million on a replacement EMC filer or shut down forever", it might be gone along with all the valuable projects hosted there.
In some ways the bundleware served like a SMART warning, causing people to back up and migrate their projects.
The way I discovered SF was down was when I was trying to install some Slackbuilds and kept getting MD5 mismatches on the source downloads. I noticed I was getting the same MD5 for several different packages, so I tried to manually grab a package and that's when I hit SF's error page (which sbopkg was happily downloading and trying to pass off as somesourcepkg.tar.gz).
I found myself in the odd position of hoping SF would come back up so I could finish what I was doing, when I'd normally welcome the news that they had shut down.
Sadly I too found it was screwed a few days ago when trying to pull some source code hosted there (ironically so I would have my own copy in case things went wrong there...). I just got their 'Disaster Recovery Mode' notice and a subset of binary packages available.
Lots of google searching for what's wrong with Sourceforge revealed nothing (other than complaints about their packaged installers/crapware). Now I have the answer to the question I was really asking.
I just need to wait and see if the developers of the packages I need will somehow migrate to github so I can get the source...
What's happened to the mailing list archives for all these projects, are they just down the toilet now? And of course the source, this is bloody terrible !
