from the this-is-not-the-host-you-are-looking-for... dept.
Google, or someone using their hosting service, noted that SourceForge had established a mirror to the official GIMP-for-Windows site and were now offering downloads which contained adware:
It appears that +SourceForge took over the control of the 'GIMP for Windows' account and is now distributing an ads-enabled installer of GIMP. They also locked out original owner of the account, Jernej Simončič, who has been building the Windows versions of GIMP for our project for years.
So far they haven't replied to provide explanations. Therefore, we remind you again that GIMP only provides builds for Windows via its official Downloads page.
SourceForge's mirrored sites facility is described thus:
The Open Source Mirror Directory is an extension to our existing software directory, where we'll be mirroring projects that are not hosted on SourceForge, and SourceForge projects that have been abandoned.
The problem, though, is that GIMP-for-Windows is not an abandoned project, but moved from SourceForge to Google because the writers "had concerns about the presence of misleading third-party ads on SourceForge".
SourceForge has responded, acknowledging that Gimp-Win had abandoned SourceForge due to misleading ads and claim "They were not alone in those concerns — we were also concerned — leading us to establish a program to enable users and developers to help us remove misleading and confusing ads." They also admit "Mirrored projects are sometimes used to deliver easy-to-decline third-party offers..." which suggests that they have merely changed the way that they deliver their ads - but not necessarily the ad's content. So, some might say, they've rectified the situation by providing both misleading ads and misleading hosting.
SourceForge also say "Since our change to mirror GIMP-Win, we have received no requests by the original author to resume use of this project. We welcome further discussion about how SourceForge can best serve the GIMP-Win author." Perhaps letting the writer choose where he hosts his project would be a good place to start.
Sourceforge hijacks GIMP For Windows project, adds malware to downloads
SourceForge (SF) has taken over control of the GIMP for Windows SF project and is now distributing an adware/malwared installer for GIMP. They also locked out the maintainer, Jernej Simončiči. Sourceforge claims it was "abandoned" and they're providing a service by "mirroring" the original, though it's unclear how much value malware adds for the end user, rather than for SF. (This comes two years after SF claiming its malware was just "misunderstood".)
Since being busted, SF is now serving an .exe that matches that at the official download site.
Other projects recently hijacked by SF include many Apache projects (Allura, Derby, Directory Studio, the Apache HTTP server, Hadoop, OpenOffice, Solr, and Subversion); Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, and FireFTP; Evolution and Open-Xchange; Drupal and WordPress; Eclipse, Aptana, Komodo, MonoDevelop, and NetBeans; VLC, Audacious, Banshee.fm, Helix, and Tomahawk media players; and many others.
[Editor's Comment: First Submission and 2nd Submission. Submissions significantly edited before publication]
Related Stories
In light of the recent activities of Dice Holdings trying to monetize the website it purchased in September 2012, Martin Brinkmann at gHacks reports
The admin of the popular NotePad++ text editor announced [June 15] that the project would leave SourceForge
[...] The project will use Github as the development hub for Notepad++ exclusively.
[...] tmux, nmap, [and] VLC for instance [are also trying] to get Sourceforge to remove [their] projects from the site
In the comments, Oxa June notes that Pale Moon is looking to move away.
In addition, Softpedia notes that WINE is migrating away.
Related: SourceForge Using Mirrored Projects and Including Adware
Slashdot Burying Stories About Dice-Owned SourceForge
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday May 28 2015, @03:16PM
Not for any copyright violation stuff, open source will make that a hard ship to sail.
But for presenting and distributing misleading products. Claiming to distribute a trademarked product and distributing something different is pretty clearly trademark infringement. Right?
Sourceforge is a horse with a broken leg.
(Score: 1) by J.J. Dane on Thursday May 28 2015, @03:19PM
Gotta love those guys..
(Score: 5, Informative) by ikanreed on Thursday May 28 2015, @03:33PM
Yes, this shit started "optional" shortly after Dice bought them. Then every decent project fled sourceforge. Now they've recognized their imminent death and are trying to squeeze a few extra dimes out of everyone elses' good name.
Which is why they need to lose a colossal amount of money and just properly die.
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Thursday May 28 2015, @03:57PM
(Score: 4, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday May 28 2015, @04:14PM
Does your mommy know that you type bad words on the internet? Another S-word from you, and someone will wash your keyboard with soap!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @04:25PM
and someone will wash your keyboard with soap!
Can they do that the next time my cat pees on my keyboard? She really does hate that thing.
(Score: 5, Touché) by tibman on Thursday May 28 2015, @04:46PM
She's jealous that you spend all day petting that instead of her.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2015, @03:34AM
As far as I know cats pee to claim ownership. It's the same thing as dogs but more direct. Maybe it likes the feeling of walking on the keyboard?
If a cat pees on you it thinks you're awesome!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @04:38PM
So I get a free keyboard cleaning by just writing "SCO" here? Or do I have to add "SystemD"? If needed, I also can add "Slashdot."
Wait, my keyboard still is dirty! "SAP"? "Sony"? What's missing?
(Score: 1) by KGIII on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:39PM
The missing component is Microsoft. You can abbreviate it by typing, "M$."
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday May 28 2015, @07:31PM
Have you seen how often he eats Dortios at the keyboard? It probably needs to be washed with soap!
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday May 28 2015, @04:23PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:25PM
..just hoping they don't go full SCO in the process. Never go full SCO.
I'm actually hoping they do.
After all, there is enough free legal advice posted on slashdot every day to keep DICE in court for decades. Better there than on the interwebs.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Thursday May 28 2015, @11:32PM
Is that same Dice that wrecked some tech blog? ;-)
Great, now we know they can't be trusted.. EVER. Congratulations Dice, trust is hereby revoked permanently.
(Score: 2) by Katastic on Thursday May 28 2015, @03:23PM
There's plenty of room for GPL and open-source related lawsuits. They've been held up time and time again in courts.
The real issue is whether a damaged party ever has the money to bring a lawsuit--and most FOSS projects have operating incomes of $0.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @03:36PM
The real issue is whether a damaged party ever has the money to bring a lawsuit--and most FOSS projects have operating incomes of $0.
That should be an easy thing to fix, the yearly budget of the Free Software Foundation has an income of around a million dollars a year, the Linux Foundation is raking in something like 10 million bucks a year.
(Score: 2) by Lunix Nutcase on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:52PM
Not for any copyright violation stuff, open source will make that a hard ship to sail.
How so? "Open source" does not mean relinquishing copyright.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Friday May 29 2015, @01:31PM
No, it does grant a right to reproduce the material as long as a copy of the license and source code are provided. Very few "open source" licenses don't.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by quacking duck on Thursday May 28 2015, @03:18PM
Sourceforge used to be a site I trusted to download software. Sad to see it's gone the way of Cnet and many (most?) other major software aggregator sites.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @04:03PM
I miss Freshmeat. I miss SourceForge. It fun just browsing through the categories to see what you could find.
(Score: 1) by KGIII on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:43PM
Before they were owned by Dice I had several programs that I'd authored and just figured I would give them away as they might be useful to some and I had no interest in monetizing them or developing them further (they were complete, why add stuff?) so I put them on SourceForge and left them. I monitored them and they were downloaded a few hundred times each in the first few months and then suddenly dropped off to near zero downloads. I could not figure out why. I searched for their unique names on the SourceForge site and found that, even with the unique names, the search results had changed and the various apps were now a couple of pages deep in the results. I was not impressed but I was not so disgusted that I removed them. I just stopped logging in and checking comments or the number of downloads.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday May 28 2015, @07:33PM
How do you feel about them delivering malware and ads with your name stamped on it?
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 1) by KGIII on Friday May 29 2015, @12:59AM
It is pretty crappy and if anyone is still using those apps they should be smart enough to notice the option to disable the adware during the install. As a firm believer that security is a process not an application I am not able to help those users and I am not so offended as to remove my content. Actually, I no longer recall the password or have the email either as the ISP went out of business and I never thought to change it. Also, from reading it, they could have locked me out. My typical emails and password combinations do not work and resetting the password was ineffective so I can not get in. So, care about it or not, there is not much to do at this point.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Score: 2, Informative) by anubi on Friday May 29 2015, @06:24AM
I have also noted a lot of "repackaging" going on... especially at CNET and download.com.
What looked like old trusted programs are now wrapped up in some sort of installer that also puts God-knows-what in my machine.
All I know to do at this point is try to find the MD5 digest of the "real thing" and compare any downloaded .exe to that.
You can get a simple MD5 digester here. [winmd5.com]
Use this digester to get the MD5 of anything ( expecially DLL's and EXE's ) you question the validity of.
You can submit the MD5 digest you get to these folks and they will tell you if they have seen it before and if it's got problems. [isthisfilesafe.com]
If you are running a system compatible with the MYCROFT search window, ( FireFox and others are compatible ), you can get the VirusTotal plugin that is also quite handy.
And don't ever let a web page install for you. You have no idea what they are going to do once you let them in. Once they insist on Java Script being enabled and they insist you have to drop your pants to get the download... they are setting you up to be screwed - big time.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2015, @05:37AM
The marketing interns at DICE only pick out popular applications, attaching it to too many things would involve more work.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Thursday May 28 2015, @03:21PM
Meme it with me.
How fall the mighty.
Remember when this was a successful offshoot of Larry Augustin's VA Research? The first Y2K commercial boom of Linux and "open source". Slashdot went into that... From hobby to venture.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday May 28 2015, @04:29PM
From hobby to venture - From happy to vultures.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Funny) by ghost on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:38PM
SF has a weird history... it was originally open source. Then they pivoted -- gave up on the hardware business, close-sourced SF, and renamed the company to SourceForge and tried to sell an enterprise version. (http://savannah.gnu.org/ was a fork... ) I guess that didn't work out because they pivoted to selling t-shirts.
Anybody else remember that advice from the golden days of slashdot? Give your software away and make money selling t-shirts and speaking at conferences?
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Friday May 29 2015, @04:20AM
Anybody else remember that advice from the golden days of slashdot? Give your software away and make money selling t-shirts and speaking at conferences?
Of course — right along with the enthusiastic claims that everyone could have awesome lucrative careers hand-coding websites in HTML 2. :-)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @03:22PM
Somebody forgot or mangled the closing tag in the Editor's comment at the bottom, as result, all articles and comments below are in the smaller font! :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @03:22PM
This story did something cool to my fonts. Everything after the end of this story is about 2pts smaller in font size.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @03:29PM
> This story did something cool to my fonts. Everything after the end of this story is about 2pts smaller in font size.
Me too.
Thought my eyes were screwed up.
Firefox 38.0 on ubuntu
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday May 28 2015, @03:42PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:17PM
What was the issue if I may ask? I always like bug review for some reason.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:01PM
(Score: 2, Funny) by KGIII on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:46PM
Well, at least your signature is honest and accurate. ;)
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2015, @09:18AM
I hope whoever moderated that post as spam gets his moderation rights revoked (unless it was by error, and the moderator informed you about the error). Whatever you may think of that post, there's one thing it definitely isn't, and that is spam.
And while I'm not a fan of the suggestion that all moderator names should be published, I think it should be public who moderates a post as spam. A spam moderation is not an ordinary moderation. It should not be treated as one.
Maybe the cost of spam moderation should be increased to match the severity of the moderation; say you need three mod points to mod someone spam. There's fortunately very little spam on this site, and moderation points are given daily, so I don't think the extra cost would have a negative impact on moderation of actual spam; moreover, if spam should ever get a major problem, such a change could easily reverted.
To avoid spam moderation by mistake, a spam moderation request probably should also come with a confirmation question, for example:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:33PM
I think this new system is bad. Just edit the post minimalistic and move on. Or no editing at all. I want to see the persons submission not the editors rewrite or interpretation of it. I feel like I need to look at both versions to see if I missed something. Editors job; Fix: links, typos, grammar(maybe), and after it's pointed out in the comments - incorrect information. Because what's incorrect to you may not be to someone else.
Feeling like I need to review that other site. Please don't make me.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday May 28 2015, @10:46PM
So what is stopping you from reading the original submission now? You can even fix: links, typos, grammar (maybe), and find your own incorrect information. Because what is incorrect to you may not be to someone else. Just skip past the summary, because you don't want to read that, and click on the link at the bottom. I can guarantee that there will be no rewrite or interpretation of it, in fact there will "no editing at all" - which is one of the options that you say you would prefer. And when we have a merged story from 2 or more different submitters, we even give you all the links.
Or, if that is too difficult, we can do that for you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2015, @12:28AM
Your job (as editor) is to fix typos and links, mostly. Why then do we have two copies of a story if that's all your doing. If you want to submit a story you can. Don't make me "look" to see if the story I'm reading is yours or the submitters. Just do away with the extra copy of a submission and fess up to any changes that you do that are significant. If I have to run kdiff on the two copies to see what you did then i guess it's time for a new site. No one cares if you correct little things; that's your job. We (I) want to read the submission as written without clicking it then backing up to comment on it. Seams foolish to me.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday May 29 2015, @06:55AM
Nobody is making you look - you choose to do that yourself.
The topic under discussion is clearly shown in the summary. Where it comes from is, to a large degree, entirely irrelevant. That is not said to belittle contributors or the submissions. Without their efforts and the subs we haven't got a site. But the site does try to output a quality product, which is something that not all our contributors are able to do. My job is far more than you think - you can read the Guide to Editing on the wiki to see what it entails - it includes making the submission appropriate to this site and acceptable to the majority of the community members.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Friday May 29 2015, @08:24AM
The summary should be just that - a factual summary of the story under discussion. It doesn't matter who submits it - it shouldn't contain personal views to any significant extent. It shouldn't have a particular bias, it should be balanced and it should be fair. It should also provoke thought and further discussion. The place for all personal views is in the comments. Now, everyone has some bias when they write a story and we do not attempt to remove every nuance. The submitter has made an effort to submit a story and that should be respected. However, the editors are supposed to be removing the majority of the personal views and ensuring that the story that hits the front page is as fair as we can make it. If you really want to get the personal viewpoint, please read the comments.
The reason that we now provide a link at all is because I made an edit but some felt that I had not provided a balanced and fair story. The submitter believes that I had put words into his mouth. I made an error and I have apologised for that. That does not imply that every other story over the last 15 months or so has been incorrectly edited, or that there is anything substantially wrong with our procedures. It was simply a human error. Nevertheless, I believe that this site should continue to offer intelligent stories in a fair and balanced way to provide material for discussion by the community. If you think that the site should be something different then you will need to start pushing for major changes to our long term vision, goals and aspirations all of which have been expressed in great detail on this site.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @03:37PM
Dice Dice Baby!
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday May 28 2015, @04:18PM
Dice: All your code base are belong to us.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 28 2015, @11:37PM
Dice: All your source code are malwared by us.
With your name....
(Score: 4, Informative) by MrNemesis on Thursday May 28 2015, @04:04PM
...this story, despite being submitted to TOGS (in related news, anyone checked out their firehose recently? It seems to have turned into Craiglist), hasn't made their front page yet. I assume the editors are too busy fucking up their CSS and putting in polls about Max Max in as stories.
GIMP aren't exactly doing a great job of publicising their windows build however. Going to the old GIMP win32 page I get a "page obsolete, look on our downloads page". On the downloads page there's no windows builds listed, only a set of hashes for the source tarballs and a link off to darkrefraction.com for nightlies. To find the windows exe, along with the actual source tarballs, you've got to hit the download site which is given less prominence than the list of MD5's and for the windows builds, spot the directory at the bottom of the page. And why make users compare versions instead of just having a nice "latest" at the top and the specific versions underneath instead of having to spot that the most recent version is in the middle of the list? Heck, I'd argue that most visitors hitting the GIMP site would be after the windows build because shurely most *nix users would be installing it through their distro repositories...? It all seems a bit "beware of the leopard" to me.
Small wonder then that piss-poor sites like Dice is wont to take control of are taking advantage of GIMP not publicising their builds terribly well...
http://www.gimp.org/windows/ [gimp.org]
http://www.gimp.org/downloads/ [gimp.org]
http://nightly.darkrefraction.com/gimp/ [darkrefraction.com]
http://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.8/ [gimp.org]
http://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.8/windows/ [gimp.org]
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:33PM
I dunno, the Gimp for Windows link is right on the Downloads page. It's the largest text on the page and it's right at the top if your user agent says you're running Windows (the only other version with similarly large text is for the OSX version, assuming you're seeing the whole list and not just the user-agent detected version).
http://www.gimp.org/downloads/ [gimp.org]
The source tarballs and nightly link is a fair bit below that.
They should probably make it bigger though, and make the gimp.org/windows/ an autoredirect to that section of the page.
(Score: 3, Informative) by MrNemesis on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:56PM
Aha - I think this is where RequestPolicy kicked in. Apparently the version detection doesn't kick in unless you allow requests to ajax.googleapis.com; once that's enabled the HTML for the windows version is loaded, if not it completely invisible.
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2015, @05:57PM
I wonder if this OS detection is the reason why I so often can't find the links to Windows versions of software to send to people via internet chat... I often like to send direct links to make sure people get the correct version, but quite often have great difficulty tracking down those links.
I had to click "other versions" under what appeared to be a section titled "GIMP for Unix-like systems" which I didn't expect to contain anything other that more Unix versions. Had I not read your post saying that the link was there, after scanning the page, I would have assumed it wasn't and went straight to the FTP servers looking for it like the GP did.
Pages hiding portions of their content behind javascript is really confusing, and completely unnecessary as it isn't as if space is limited. Correct design such as putting "choose your OS" links at the top of the page would eliminate the need to scroll through the page without hiding anything from anyone. If one really wants to detect the OS, it would be better just to highlight that version and maybe display it first rather than remove all of the links to the other versions.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @04:06PM
What are the alternatives to SourceForge?
Fuck you Dice for shitting on everything that is good.
(Score: 1) by BananaPhone on Thursday May 28 2015, @04:19PM
wasn't /. bought by Dice, too?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @04:56PM
So you say it's time for SoylentSource?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:27PM
was thinking the same thing, although they have more than enough work to do here.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:01PM
We actually had this. I was against using github back at go live so the initial development of our branch of slashcode was on a copy of GForge which is a fork of the original VA Linux Sourcefrge.net. our github mirror became more popular than the gforge instance so I retired it a month after golive.
If there was demand, a soylentcode site could be launched, though given the sheer amount of code hosting sites I'm not sure there is a lot of point ...
Still always moving
(Score: 1) by magamo on Thursday May 28 2015, @07:00PM
How about doing projects reporting/news site, ala freshmeat.net/freecode, since that is now defunct, and nothing quite like it, or as good as it has yet to appear. That may be a worthwhile thing.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:00PM
We could do this once we deploy rehash and have proper nexus support if volunteers are willing to make submissions.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by bryan on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:34PM
A few alternatives [ibiblio.org] popped up after the FreeCode demise. https://freshcode.club/ [freshcode.club] seems to be one of the more popular upstarts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2015, @08:22AM
Chaosesque Anthology uses freshcode
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Thursday May 28 2015, @07:36PM
What is wrong with Github?
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Thursday May 28 2015, @07:57PM
I'm not the biggest fan of third party hosting services; I've been screwed over before. GitHub however makes a lot of got tasks stupidly easy and is more user friendly than GForge or just a git repo hosted on one of our servers
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by bryan on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:56PM
An alternative to relying on GitHub's service is to install GitLab Community Edition [gitlab.com] on your own server. The software is very similar to what GitHub is offering.
Gitorious [wikipedia.org] (previously hosting a few large repositories such as QT) merged with GitLab [gitlab.com] a few months ago.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Friday May 29 2015, @03:43AM
Ahh yeah, this makes sense. I've been using BitBucket at work, which is mostly just a crashier slower GitHub. Though it is cheaper for small companies and great if you already have a Jira lifecycle.
But yeah, if you are doing hosting, you might as well just run Git or a suite depending on what you really need.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Friday May 29 2015, @12:44PM
I wouldn't bother with code hosting. Keep this site focused on news and discussion.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday June 18 2015, @02:50AM
The point is that Soylent has built trust.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Nerdfest on Thursday May 28 2015, @04:34PM
GitHub, BitBucket.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday May 28 2015, @04:49PM
I second github. It doesn't have all the features that SF had but it is plenty good enough.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by blackhawk on Friday May 29 2015, @08:09AM
I second Bitbucket just for giving you as many free private repos as you want. It gives you a chance to kick off a project without it being subject to public scrutiny, then open it up when it suits your timetable.
Call me a heathen user of filthy Windows and unspeakable GUIs, but I also like to use Sourcetree for my day to day work.
(Score: 2, Informative) by ghost on Thursday May 28 2015, @05:45PM
(Score: 1) by TestablePredictions on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:55PM
What are the alternatives to SourceForge?
Whatever they are, I wish they would be decentralized somehow. Companies or organizations can be pressured by shareholders to monetize the site, or pressured by spooks, or pressured by political activists, etc... It hardly happens that often, but I'm just so sick of it happening at all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2015, @07:14AM
There is no alternative for large projects.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:42PM
I don't have the headspace to dig up his exact quite but it might have been in the GNU Manifesto.
yes this is irritating to many but this kind of thing is among the specific reasons we have free software.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Lunix Nutcase on Thursday May 28 2015, @08:55PM
There's a big difference between "selling free software" and pedaling crapware to unsuspecting people by hijacking a project's installer.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday May 28 2015, @09:02PM
I'm not so sure that I agree that it's unethical.
Consider that while Richard says it's OK to sell free software, and while he is very ardently outspoken with his humanitarian work, he publishes his humanitarian writing on stallman.org, and not on fsf.org nor gnu.org.
His essays on free software, to the best of my knowledge, don't say anything at all as to whether he regards it as permissible to use free software for political repression.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2015, @05:39AM
He'd only care if the malware were not also libre software.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2015, @06:31PM
They are trading on the good name of other software to trick people into installing crapware. That is unethical. If they were charging, then it would be clear up front to anyone trying to download from them could decide if they were providing enough value to be worth the money, that would be okay. If they want to fork the project, they could then release it under a different name, and then bundle it with whatever they like (as long as it doesn't violate whatever license the code is under), then that should be fine.
So to be clear, what makes what they are doing unethical is the specific way they are doing it.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday May 28 2015, @11:56PM
*peddling. We're not delivering it on a bicycle.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by CortoMaltese on Thursday May 28 2015, @11:19PM
Anyone who distributes legitimate software with adware or bundleware deserves to be Hanged, drawn and quartered
(Score: 2, Funny) by OwMyBrain on Friday May 29 2015, @02:40PM
Whoa! Slow down there! Don't hang them _before_ they're drawn and quartered.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2015, @12:30AM
Doesn't hanging them after drawing and quartering require more rope?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday May 28 2015, @11:44PM
So SourceForge and Dice want to join the Shitlist and have their trust wiped out.
Nice business you got there.. :^)
Better start with signed releases and signatures along with every commit. Such that anyone that downloads stuff will be alerted to malware. Which also would be useful against men in black.