> I know they have allegedly improved after new owners and a come-to-jesus moment, but damn, that was some shady shit.

If Facebook tomorrow started saying they're totally going to stop being creepy and got a new CEO, I wouldn't suddenly start trusting them either.

We're a small independently owned private company, and not a single person responsible for those decisions made years ago is still involved with the company. It's been over 3 years since we bought SourceForge and we reversed all the bad decisions on day 1 and never looked back. We still support Mercurial https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/documentation/Mercurial/#pub...

But why buy such a tarnished trademark which has garnered so much ill will over the years for horrible practices? Is it a form of "all PR is good PR", that it's better to have a recognized but hated name than to have a name nobody knows of?

Most people have gotten the message that things have changed at SourceForge. We bought it to redeem the name and protect free open source software.

I still avoid SourceForge links because of that annoying 'Your download will start shortly...' interstitial.