Wow, having read both sides of the story, can’t say I blame them. I wonder when we’ll finally abandon malware as a business strategy? It can’t possibly work forever.
Sao, quoted from the linked article:
We believe we are now in compliance with open source best-practices by mirroring original versions of project files in an effort to ensure that people who come to SourceForge to find these programs may easily find the most current version available.
So, let me get this straight, their “effort” to ensure people find the latest version of the software they’re after is to host the original versions (read: old) that aren’t being updated by the developers?
What? How does that even…?
e: or have they just written that in a daft way that makes me think that, and that the “original files” being mirrored are up to date files from another site? Psyduck face
I kinda noticed this about two years ago, without knowing why. I’ve barely D/L’ed anything from SourceForge since then.
I remember reading an article about what happens when you download the most popular software from D/L sites a while back, turns out that was about download.com but this doesn’t sound any different.
So what’s the new repository of choice? Github? It seems like a lot of projects have moved there.
Could the GPL be updated to disallow this?
Man I liked sourceforge for just poking about and seeing what was there. Though as it currently is and it looks like DICE does not want to clean up their act I won’t be that sad to see it go.
I doubt that they are planning to do so. Blowing that much trust and goodwill isn’t something you recover from, especially when you were having difficulty against Github on level ground.
Sourceforge’s management appears to have decided that its value is maximized by being sent to the chop shop and stripped of residual value, not by being sent in for repair. At some point, the cost of hosting will presumably eclipse ad impressions + malware installs, and they’ll call it a day; but this is very much a terminal cash extraction strategy.
You, sir, have won the Internet today with your choice of GIF to head this post!
I wonder how long slashdot will survive after that. Not that I ever commented much there but it was and marginally still is a nice news source.
So, the Romney Job Creation strategy?
I suspect that his finance background would allow for even more baroque and convoluted techniques; but the same basic spirit of chop-shop capitalism in both cases.
I hope someone’s planning to archive the content one way or another. There’s an awful lot of dormant projects that are probably worth saving for posterity. (And probably an awful lot more whose loss will be mourned by none. But hey, someone saved Geocities.)
Which may just be replacing the old boss with a new one. Github itself isn’t (yet) profitable, and they generally went the same way as SF in terms of trying to monetise first by offering a paid service. It’s because that strategy didn’t succeed in turning a profit that SF went down this rabbit hole…
And now Google Code is dead too. Leaves us with a single point of failure.
It’s like DRM - the moment you need to give someone permission to access, you need to give them permission to use it in pretty much any way they like. If they have license to redistribute, as part of a collection, which can include non-free items (which is most distros), they have the license to do this. I don’t see how you could change the GPL to get around that. More to the point, even if you did, who decides what’s “malicious”?
All of the problems with Sourceforge that I’ve read are from people downloading binaries. Don’t do that. It’s a source repository. Download the source code.
Which would be nice if ./configure actually worked 100 percent of the time. On my mac, it can be a little difficult to find and install all the required packages- and sometimes, I don’t feel like debugging autotools.
There’s GitLab (which got Gitorious) and Bitbucket, still.
I’ve been happy on GitHub, but I haven’t spent any money there.
I just realized in the past hour that some code I had rewritten was on Sourceforge.
So, gonna move that to Github at some point soon. yeesh.
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