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“It appears that SourceForge took control of the 'GIMP for Windows' account”

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Re: “It appears that SourceForge took control of the 'GIMP for Windows' account”

#21

Post by ksherlock »

cillian64 wrote: post #13

Is there anything suggesting it's SourceForge itself doing this and not just (an improbably widespread, admittedly) set of account breaches? It makes sense -- acquire accounts, enable ads, profit.

"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."

Why are we doing this? We want the SourceForge software directory to be as useful as possible. When you come here to search for a piece of software, we want you to be able to find it, and find the most up to date releases. And if that software isn't hosted on SourceForge, we still want you to be able to find it. Or if a SourceForge project has been abandoned, we want it moved to the mirror and maintained, so you can always find the newest releases. Millions of people use SourceForge every day to search for Open Source software, and we want to give them the best experience possible, even if the best answer to their search is a project hosted elsewhere, or an abandoned project newly maintained by the SourceForge team.

http://sourceforge.net/mirror/

Re: “It appears that SourceForge took control of the 'GIMP for Windows' account”

#22

Post by prokoudine »

psykovsky wrote: post #16
prokoudine wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://sourceforge.net/u/sf-editor1/profile/ Nice list. Got Audacity there, for instance.

Bitcoin is on there also. Now that is worrying.

It doesn't neccessarily mean all of them are affected, but I think it's a call for a close inspection.

Re: “It appears that SourceForge took control of the 'GIMP for Windows' account”

#27

Post by shiggerino »

baldfat wrote: post #15
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The safest thing to do would be to assume that all software there is similarly afflicted and to never use Sourceforge again. People who host software there should move to a different platform.

The only issue is that Sourceforge made nice binaries available. Most people have no idea how to use git and/or build their own binaries.

Surely hosting static files on the internet is trivial to accomplish these days, even without the help of Malwareforge.

Re: “It appears that SourceForge took control of the 'GIMP for Windows' account”

#28

Post by biot »

etix wrote: post #24

This is precisely for these reasons we stopped distributing VLC via SF.net in 2013. I even wrote about it: https://blog.l0cal.com/2013/05/02/rethinking-vlc-mirrors-inf...

Have you checked your site on an iPad? It's alternating the font size between small and large several times a second, resulting in a strobe effect that never stops. Yikes!

Re: “It appears that SourceForge took control of the 'GIMP for Windows' account”

#29

Post by scrollaway »

Reposting what I wrote on the Reddit thread:

I'm one of the lead devs of LXQt and an LXDE sysadmin. We use Sourceforge for our mailing lists and some LXDE legacy stuff.

I'm absolutely sick of them. It's not the first time this has happened. I've been pushing for us to move off SF for a while and this is a good occasion to push for it harder.

I've sent an email [1] detailing plans to move. I am urging everyone who still has projects on Sourceforge to do the same.

If you have similar migration problems to solve as the ones I've highlighted in the email, please contact me directly and we can share the workload. My email is available on my Github profile [2].

[1] http://sourceforge.net/p/lxde/mailman/message/34148903/ [2] https://github.com/jleclanche

Re: “It appears that SourceForge took control of the 'GIMP for Windows' account”

#30

Post by JohnTHaller »

geofft wrote: post #14

What are the reasons for people to use SourceForge today? Why hasn't everyone else ( especially major projects like GIMP and Audacity) moved off? Here are some possibilities I can think of, but I'm curious if they're correct: - Mailing list hosting - Non-git repository hosting, for projects that prefer CVS or SVN - Shell account (though it doesn't seem very useful) - Features GitHub has but few others do (binary host…

One reason is discoverability as they have a rather extensive searchable directory of open source software.

Another reason for quite a while was binary hosting, which github originally supported, then discontinued, but finally added again in July 2013. Additionally, the ability to use any open source license or combinations of licenses, as Google Code supported binary downloads during the time github didn't but only permitted one license per project and only from a subset of open source licenses (originally a small subset, later expanded). Google Code, of course, is sunsetting now. And github now supports multiple licenses as well as binary releases.

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