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SourceForge's GitHub Importer

sourceforge.net

31–40 of 102 posts

Re: SourceForge's GitHub Importer

#32

Websense blacklisted Sourceforge after the 2013 DevShare debacle. It has remained blacklisted since. It is blacklisted in many other web application firewalls and content gateways too. Sourceforge is inaccessible from many corporate networks due to this. It will remain inaccessible for many more years to come. It's unfortunate how Sourceforge, once a leader in the open source community, lost the trust and reputation…

>It may take another 14 years to regain this lost trust and even that may not be enough.

That's absolutely absurd given how often the biggest names in 'tech' make headlines with one egregious act or another, on a seemingly weekly basis, and continue to march on. As if the tech community can sit atop some moral high ground, thumbing its nose at SourceForge. But nah, let's just keep crapping on a company no longer under the same ownership and no longer committing these acts and hasn't for some time.

Re: SourceForge's GitHub Importer

#34

Websense blacklisted Sourceforge after the 2013 DevShare debacle. It has remained blacklisted since. It is blacklisted in many other web application firewalls and content gateways too. Sourceforge is inaccessible from many corporate networks due to this. It will remain inaccessible for many more years to come. It's unfortunate how Sourceforge, once a leader in the open source community, lost the trust and reputation…

It's worth pointing out that SourceForge as we knew it back then ceased to exist quite some time ago. SourceForge was sold to DHI Group, Inc. (DICE's parent company) in 2012 and many of the staff were let go as part of the sale. DevShare came into play in 2014 and was originally billed as a way to help open source developers who wanted to sign up earn an income from their open source work. But then it wound up using dark patterns and then it was morphed into something more and started to be added to projects that didn't want it done (in violation of some trademarks and the like). This destroyed the good will that still existed around the brand even though most of the folks who made SourceForge SourceForge were long gone.

SourceForge was then sold again in 2016 to BIZX, LLC who killed the DevShare program and started scanning all downloads for malware and other baddies.

Re: SourceForge's GitHub Importer

#36
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it slightly odd that sourceforge is so highly shunned after the malware incidents, while various other large companies [eg. microsoft (dodgy behaviour in skype, etc.), facebook (spying, selling data), lenovo (superfish), etc.] have been caught doing similar dodgy things and yet it feels like the general community has forgiven or at least grudgingly overlooking them. May or may not be true - that's just the fee…

SourceForge gets shunned first because it’s easy. There are lots of great alternatives to SourceForge. SourceForge was already on the decline before their adware bundling fiasco so continuing to not use SourceForge is no burden for most devs. Second, what SourceForge did was worse than your examples. They modified trusted applications to add essentially a malware payload. This is worse than Facebook collecting too mu…

It's worth noting that SourceForge didn't modify trusted applications. They switched their download buttons on the site to download an "installer app" by default that would act as the installer, offer bundleware, and then live download the actual app installer as part of the install process. Apps like GIMP etc were never, to my knowledge, modified to bundle GIMP and bundleware within a single installer.

Source: I was hosted on SourceForge at the time and approached about participating in DevShare. I researched it extensively and saved copies of the stub installers for things like GIMP as part of that research.

Re: SourceForge's GitHub Importer

#37
post #26
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. I wonder what their agenda is. Not assuming absolute malice, but I am really curious.

I wonder too. A legacy brand sometimes has value, or at least is valued, but this one has a lot of tarnish. They're still around (surprising) so maybe they're kinda ... making something money wise? I dunno...

Yeah we're profitable now without DevShare. Lotta people hated what happened to SourceForge, including me. That's why I bought it and removed DevShare.

Re: SourceForge's GitHub Importer

#38
post #26
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. I wonder what their agenda is. Not assuming absolute malice, but I am really curious.

I wonder too. A legacy brand sometimes has value, or at least is valued, but this one has a lot of tarnish. They're still around (surprising) so maybe they're kinda ... making something money wise? I dunno...

This reminds me of MySpace.

What's going on over there now?

Re: SourceForge's GitHub Importer

#39

Does anyone still use SourceForge after they started embedding adware with their download links? I give them credit for being an early innovator and I know they are under new management as of 2016 and supposedly put that behind them[1] but they have permanently lost my trust. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/under...

PortableApps.com is still hosted on SourceForge. I think we push around 40TB a month through their download servers. We can't afford that bandwidth on our own. Other hosts like Github aren't really designed for projects like ours that have hundreds of different open source apps.

Re: SourceForge's GitHub Importer

#40

Does anyone still use SourceForge after they started embedding adware with their download links? I give them credit for being an early innovator and I know they are under new management as of 2016 and supposedly put that behind them[1] but they have permanently lost my trust. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/under...

Do you know we have nothing to do with the people that made the decisions to do that bad stuff? I, like you, didn't like it, so I bought SourceForge to remove the bad stuff. I still get shit for it. Kinda weird because the people giving me shit didn't put their financial wellness or reputation on the line to fix what they didn't like, but still armchair quarterback about it. It's like someone saw it fit to burn down a museum, and then someone stepped in to save it and everything inside of it, but still takes the blame for the person who wanted to burn it down. Very odd...
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