Forges are online collaborative platforms to support the development of distributed open source software. While once mighty keepers of open source vitality, software forges are rapidly becoming less and less relevant. For example, of the top 10 forges in 2011, only one survives today—SourceForge—the biggest of them all, but its numbers are dropping and its community is tenuous at best. Through mixed‐methods research, this article chronicles and analyze the software practice and experiences of the project's history—in particular its architectural and community/organizational decisions. We discovered a number of suboptimal social and architectural decisions and circumstances that, may have led to SourceForge's demise. In addition, we found evidence suggesting that the impact of such decisions could have been monitored, reduced, and possibly avoided altogether. The use of sociotechnical insights needs to become a basic set of design and software/organization monitoring principles that tell a cautionary tale on what to measure and what not to do in the context of large‐scale software forge and community design and management.

中文翻译：

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“煤矿中的金丝雀……”SourceForge 衰落的警示故事

Forges 是支持分布式开源软件开发的在线协作平台。虽然曾经是开源活力的强大守护者，但软件伪造正迅速变得越来越不重要。例如，在 2011 年排名前 10 的锻造厂中，只有一个今天幸存下来——SourceForge——其中最大的一家，但它的数量正在下降，而且它的社区充其量也很脆弱。通过混合方法研究，本文记录并分析了项目历史的软件实践和经验，尤其是其架构和社区/组织决策。我们发现了许多可能导致 SourceForge 消亡的次优社会和架构决策和环境。此外，我们发现有证据表明此类决策的影响可以被监控、减少、并且可能完全避免。社会技术洞察力的使用需要成为一套基本的设计和软件/组织监控原则，在大规模软件锻造和社区设计和管理的背景下讲述一个关于测量什么和不做什么的警示故事。