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SourceForge Advertising Software

SourceForge Suspends Independent Project Mirroring 124

Posted by Soulskill from the reflecting-on-mirrors dept.
vivaoporto writes: In a reversal motivated by community concerns (like the high profile outcry over the distribution of an ads-enabled installer for GIMP and the accusation by Fyodor of the hijacking of the nmap SourceForge project), SourceForge has discontinued third-party bundling of mirrored content.

Along with that, as of June 18th, SourceForge started "removing SourceForge-maintained mirrored projects" and engaging their "newly-formed Community Panel to discuss site features and program policies including a redesigned mirror program." Of the 295 mirrored projects, they removed all that were "not co-maintained with one or more of the original developers, except where the upstream site has been discontinued." For those wanting to reach SourceForge for some constructive feedback, they point to the recently-established Community Voice forum. Note: SourceForge and Slashdot share a corporate overlord.
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SourceForge Suspends Independent Project Mirroring More

SourceForge Suspends Independent Project Mirroring

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  • Meh (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bulled ( 956533 ) on Friday June 19, 2015 @11:12AM (#49945503)
    It took them long enough to reverse something that should never have happened in the first place. Sorry Sourceforge, we had a good run, but this finally pushed me to move else where for project hosting.

    • Re:Meh (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Megane ( 129182 ) on Friday June 19, 2015 @11:39AM (#49945781)

      That's what the PHBs who order these kind of changes (often so they can look like they're doing something) never think about. When you've done something to break the trust of a community, no matter how on the decline said community may be, it's very hard to repair the damage to your reputation afterward. Slashdot Beta would have been a worse mistake if they hadn't had the "&nobeta=1" escape clause, but fortunately that meant they only went half way before the community pushed back. (And I still think the "text over images" design meme is stupid. Just look at this abomination of web design. [newsradioklbj.com])

      How many of you out there are still avoiding the use of FTDI's USB serial chips? And how many of you instantly wrote them off and gave them the "unperson" treatment?

    • Why were you still using Sourceforge even before Dice bought it? It was a ghost town even then.

      • Many, many years ago, Sourceforge used to be not bad (or even good), plus until some years ago there were no good alternatives - then, some years ago (especially after DICE bought it), Sourceforge decided to make money with the worst possible way (especially since it was against the "spirit" of many/most projects/developers hosted there): by fraud (sure, i am bad with my English, but in Greek i would had call it... "fraud", plus -from the first definition of a dictionary [reference.com]- i quote: "deceit, trickery, sharp p

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by edibobb ( 113989 )
      It was not a reverse. It was a postponement. From the SourceForge blog: "SourceForge pledges to present third-party offers only with the projects that explicitly opted-in to that program." So sourceforge will give money to developers if they agree to allow malware in install files. "We are forming a Community Panel to review our mirroring practices and guide the way mirrors are established and the presentation of mirrored content on the site." So sourceforge will resurrect their distribution of non-sourc

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

        No, no, no. This is their new program to vet developers so that we users can easily tell which projects will sell us out.

    • And it's not just devs who've gotten the message. It's been close to a decade since I last hosted a project on Sourceforge, and so I see myself merely as a normal end-user, but I've gotten the message, too. Sourceforge is no longer trustworthy, and I won't be downloading any project from it, ever again.

  • just die already (Score:4, Insightful)

    by i_ate_god ( 899684 ) on Friday June 19, 2015 @11:14AM (#49945525)

    no one cares about you, and your download pages full of ads and big bright green fake download buttons. The only thing you can do that would be of any value, is something akin to the old Walnut Creek FTP site.

    Otherwise, fuck off

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

      And remember when the old Walnut Creek FTP was acquired by Digital River, who shortly thereafter nuked all the non-paying archives with absolutely no notice??

      The DOOM archive was saved because I'd found some financial statements that Digital River had accidentally left accessible, and judging by the state of their profits, I smelled trouble and predicted that the free FTP would very soon go away. Fortunately the DOOM archive maintainer believed me, and mirrored our stuff elsewhere.

      Other archives were not so

      • "The DOOM archive was saved"

        If you rely on a 3rd party to maintain the _only_ copy of your work then you're a fucking retard who probably deserves to lose your shit

        (and please tell me your projects so I know to avoid them. They're clearly not going to get long-term support)

        Seriously. it's a total facepalm if XYZ site (or website) goes away and the data that was on it isn't mirrored somewhere else (or isn't simply a mirror of your private, backed-up master server)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

          This was 2001. At the time there weren't all that many options in free FTP hosts, let alone with decent bandwidth. Walnut Creek's FTP.CDROM.COM had been THE main archive host for the whole world for a decade, and a lot of scenes depended on it. Mirrors that could handle its level of traffic were rare to nonexistent, and often limited to university use. Bandwidth/hosting was still expensive and even our puny 4GB archive was still a LOT of data (IIRC total data was about 300GB). So yeah, single point of failu

          • In 2001 I was operating mirrors of several sites and had the mirror scripts set to not delete things if the master "went away", following incidents in 1994

            More importantly the ftp sites themselves were supposed to be publicly accessable mirrors of archives of software collections - the point being that there were master copies "somewhere".

            In 1997-1999 there had already been a number of instances of script kiddies wiping out ISP webservers (and their disk-based "backups"), which underscored the importance of

  • Kickstarter campaign to fix the overlord problem? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Friday June 19, 2015 @11:19AM (#49945601)

    >> SourceForge and Slashdot share a corporate overlord.

    How about a Kickstarter campaign to fix our current "corporate overlord" problem?

    • Interesting. How much do you think Slashdot is worth?

      I'm tired of them "curating" the user experience...

    • Re:Kickstarter campaign to fix the overlord proble (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 19, 2015 @12:03PM (#49945997)

      just move to https://www.soylentnews.org/ [soylentnews.org] clon...

      done... no kickstarted neeeded

    • Re:Kickstarter campaign to fix the overlord proble (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Pseudonymous Powers ( 4097097 ) on Friday June 19, 2015 @12:13PM (#49946089)

      I have often wondered about this myself. Is Slashdot worth more to its users that it is to its corporate masters? Is there some sum of money that unsatisfied Slashdot users could scrape together, perhaps over weeks and months, contributing some petty sum to some online swear jar whenever they encounter a petty annoyance, that would eventually accumulate into something that Dice would have to take seriously?

      The thing is, from a revenue perspective, I'm not sure Slashdot is worth anything at all. There's no "there" there--its value is almost entirely in its network of engaged commenters. I'm pretty sure 9x% of the people who visit Slashdot use ad blockers, and even if you somehow found a way to sneak ads past the blockers, that would just cause those people to exodus anyway. So I guess ideally Slashdot would have to be run as sort of a public service, rather than as a money-maker. I figured Dice bought Slashdot and SourceForge to drive traffic to their job site, sort of as a loss-leader, goodwill gesture, look-at-us-we-totally-get-you-guys, please-consider-us-for-your-next-job-search sort of thing. But given how they're seemingly burning the goodwill candle at both ends by pushing through unpopular measure after unpopular measure, I have to admit I can't figure out what their real strategy is.

      Then again, how much could Slashdot cost to run? It's just a forum, for chissakes, right?

      Then again again, if it's just a forum, why hasn't everybody moved on, en masse, to one of the clones of Slashdot that disgruntled Slashdotters have started in recent years? Because it's all about the network, I guess, and two halves of a big network aren't even half as good as the original network.

      Beats me. I hope somebody figures something out before too long, though.

      • Then again, how much could Slashdot cost to run? It's just a forum, for chissakes, right?

        It's a forum that gets Slashdotted all day, every day.

        I know a guy who wrote about some of his research, and it was Slashdotted. He analyzed the traffic pattern, and though I can't find that analysis any more, he estimated the budget it'd take to survive the story's front-page run without downtime. It was not a small number.

        Extrapolate that to running all day, every day, and serving more than a simple static HTML page, and even with the improvements in technology, we're still going to be dealing in numbers

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          /. doesn't demand nearly the traffic it used to. Likewise, it doesn't send as much traffic as it used to. So, it's no surprise kids these days don't even know what 'slashdotting' is!

      • So I guess ideally Slashdot would have to be run as sort of a public service, rather than as a money-maker. I figured Dice bought Slashdot and SourceForge to drive traffic to their job site, sort of as a loss-leader, goodwill gesture, look-at-us-we-totally-get-you-guys, please-consider-us-for-your-next-job-search sort of thing. But given how they're seemingly burning the goodwill candle at both ends by pushing through unpopular measure after unpopular measure, I have to admit I can't figure out what their real strategy is.

        Maybe it's not an evil plan by Dice? I suspect it is some newly-appointed, over-eager IT dude that tries to "improve" the website and make it more 2.0, and perhaps also make some tasks easier for them (site management, statistics). The guy hasn't given up yet ;) but he is learning to make smaller steps.

        Then again, how much could Slashdot cost to run? It's just a forum, for chissakes, right?

        Then again again, if it's just a forum, why hasn't everybody moved on, en masse, to one of the clones of Slashdot that disgruntled Slashdotters have started in recent years?

        That would require changing bookmarks, and habits, both of which is hard! *whine*

        By the way, that soylentnews site is looking for someone to make their page (slashcode) more web 2.0. How ironic. [soylentnews.org]

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by KGIII ( 973947 )

        It seems that one could possibly convince people to invest in purchasing this site and allowing it to be run by a community oversight committee of sorts though the funding parties would certainly want some control and veto power (as well as explicit ownership) and could probably run nothing but text based ads assuming we cheap bastards actually clicked on the ones that we found interesting. I suspect there would be some sort of no-compete but a jobs-offering (that is not abused and is realistic) alongside t

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

        The logic sometimes isn't profit. Sometimes the logic is being able to show a loss for tax purposes. See also "Hollywood accounting".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vadim_t ( 324782 )

      And then what? Slashdot needs money on a regular basis.

      Slashdot would need a way of getting enough people to pay to sustain itself, and that seems tricky. The audience is tech savvy with adblock and other places like reddit offer more value and still have trouble earning money.

  • Creditability lost (Score:5, Insightful)

    by noldrin ( 635339 ) on Friday June 19, 2015 @11:23AM (#49945641)
    At this point, downloaders can't have confidence that any software coming from Sourceforge hasn't been tampered with and might include unwanted guests. Till they establish ethics in how they host software which conform to what most users expect from a software download site, they are a no go for me

  • Just stop abusing "good will" projects (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BenJeremy ( 181303 ) on Friday June 19, 2015 @11:25AM (#49945659)

    SourceForge should never have been considered a potential revenue stream... it should have been preserved as a community service project that enhances your standing in relation to those parts of Dice that do generate revenue.

    Corporate execs are far too quick to forget that.

    Lots of tech companies subsidize community service projects - this is great, but abusing these efforts, and trying to make a quick buck off them is a quick way to damage your reputation in the tech world. Building trust and admiration through such projects takes time and effort, and can be very rewarding to a company's bottom line, but when you betray the trust, it can quickly become a poison that no amount of time can heal.

    Dice, you've gained a lot of people who will never forget this. Certainly, many of them were not exactly fans to begin with, but they will be vociferous and their influence WILL impact your bottom line. Trying to make that quick buck will cost you far more in the long run. I certainly hope whoever was behind this "idea" has been sent packing. The road to rebuilding your reputation will be a long and painful one.

    • Dice? Reputation? Please! Wall Street whores do business with each other out of professional courtesy, fully aware of each others' "reputation".

  • SourceForge was just trying to help app other apps (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    SourceForge was doing everyone a service by apping Luddite software using AppWare, so it could be apped by modern appers who only app apps!

    Apps!

  • "opt-in" = sodomy (Score:3)

    by wcrowe ( 94389 ) on Friday June 19, 2015 @11:36AM (#49945753)

    " With that in mind, SourceForge pledges to present third-party offers only with the projects that explicitly opted-in to that program."

    These days, whenever I see a company or organization use the phrase "opt-in", I immediately tune out anything else that is said, and decide I want nothing more to do with that company or organization.

  • Good luck, it is going to take a long time and a lot of effort to win back the trust the SF once had.

    • Exactly. SourceForge was once my go-to place for open source software. I won't use them again.

  • As long as were having a Dice hatefest, (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    clicked on a job ad just for shits and grins, linked to Randstad USA. Next day i get an e mail from Randstad...the only connection between my e mail address and Randstad is Slashdot...thanks for the spam assholes.

  • In a reversal motivated by community concerns

    Bullshit. Dice doesn't care about any "community". It was a reversal motivated by the fact that they got caught serving crapware and people spread the info far-and-wide. Otherwise, they would have kept on serving the crapware unabated had they been able to contain the PR disaster.

    • I liked how they characterized it as "a short-run test of third-party offers on five of the mirrored projects." Do they really think that anyone is dumb enough to believe that this was intended to just be temporary trial?

  • As a wise man once said... (Score:3)

    by Marginal Coward ( 3557951 ) on Friday June 19, 2015 @12:13PM (#49946095)

    "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."

    - Warren Buffett

    • Dice has never had that good of a reputation anyway so they probably don't see any big loss.

      • I was thinking more of SourceForge itself, though it happens to be a Dice property. Previously, I used to trust it as a source of binaries that I might download and run. Currently, I don't. I may trust it again one day, but it will take a while.

        • I'd never trust it as long as it's part of "Dice Holdings".

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by KGIII ( 973947 )

            Well, nutcase is in your name. Not that I trust them but I am not saying that it is impossible for me to trust them in the future. Something, I should check, that I was playing with (I found it from a link here on this site) was downloaded from another site but it was a wrapped of sorts. It installed some software and then downloaded some stuff from SF during the install. I watched and let it run and then checked everything. I probably should have used the sandbox in Acronis. I also should check to see what

  • For me, trust in the SourceForge site is still not getting repaired until software like Filezilla can be safely downloaded with no fear of bundled "offered software"

    I pity the fool that makes a recommendation to a client or vendor to use FileZilla.

    For an illustration of how trust matters, go to the SourceForge site and compare customer comments of FileZilla vs WinSCP

  • Notice how all the comments on this thread that might offend Dice management have been downvoted as "Troll"? Don't worry, though. It's just a coincidence. A company with the strong moral fiber of Dice would never interfere in a public forum.

  • Let it rot (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Just move projects to GitHub, and let Source Forge rot.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

      Everything needs to be more broadly mirrored, so there's not a single point of failure for the source community. One or two big hubs may be convenient but if that one or two go bad, then what?

  • I'm really happy (not surprised, as I expect unbiased content throughout /. ) that this article's tone is much more in line with what neutral journalism deserves. I am also glad about the topic itself: that SF has decided to do it all on fair'er terms - they seem to be going in the right direction on this particular mirror subject.

    It's still a shame for the ads on all other things SF, besides the mirrors. We all dread ads, and only people who chose such a business model can make sense of things like intrusi

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by KGIII ( 973947 )

      Ads? I see the option to turn them off but I am like, "Umm... Thanks? I have that taken care of already." The only times I have used that feature it was when it was an option in the paid service and I did not feel right just remaining a paid member so the way to reduce my time (in other words, actually let them benefit from my donation/fee) was to disable ads. I think I may have drunkly spent a bit on this. It was some time ago. It may have been Fark that I "donated" a few hundred dollars to. It gets worse.

      • Not all the places I read /. (e.g. Chrome for Android) _can_ have adblock enabled, or I just don't have the authority to do so (managed/friend's pc). And I do read /. a lot daily, like 40 refreshes in +3 different platforms per day, so it does help tbh, especially on Android. Firefox for Android provides adblock, but the app really sucks in general and the fact I can have plugins just doesn't make up the fact it isn't half as usable as Chrome. Google really does pimp that port like a winning horse and they
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by KGIII ( 973947 )

      Heh... You do not want to know what they do to your groceries. They will leave the package the same size but decrease the weight. Packages are all designed (pretty much all) as a relative to the perfect number. Water is added to your meat. The sprinklers on the produce are not just there to keep the vegetables fresh. Your meat is probably dyed - ground burger should, probably, not be red. Obviously you may shop at better places but I am sure you are still getting fucked behind the scenes with everything the

  • Given this kind of "spin" on the problem, I'm sure the client agreements with Slashdot will include "opt-in" as the default setting on every agreement.

  • I have noticed over the last few months that there were sourceforge projects I showed an interest in that were binary only. For a time I tried to convince myself the project maintainers were just too busy and they were behind posting the sources. Now I see that we could rename the site, Binary-Forge. I remember clearly that for a long time, SF was the premier site for hosting open source development. I myself developed an open source XML project on SF (xmltools). There is a big difference though between h

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