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SourceForge Terms of Service Change, Users Unhappy
An email fluttering around a few mailing lists has been submitted in
various forms here today. It's about changes to the SourceForge
terms of service. Some relevant links unclude the
old terms,
new terms,
old privacy statement,
new privacy statement
and
contact for "questions or concerns"
(Patrick McGovern, Site Director). Obviously since SF is owned by the
same parent company as Slashdot, I'm biased and corrupt and you should
ignore my opinions on the subject, but while
I don't particularly like this any more then anyone else, I also
don't think it's the huge deal that others are making of it. Especially
considering projects aren't paying for the free service. You get
what you pay for after all.
I have attached a summary to this article of the changes that are
being called into question if you don't want to do a mental diff
on the links above.
This list was submitted by a few different users and was apparently originally posted to several mailing lists, although I don't know who actually originally wrote it. I just quote it here for reference.
- They can henceforth change the terms without notice, just by posting the new terms on the website. (Currently they are obliged to give 15 days notice by email, a period that we are currently in for this change.)
- They can henceforth remove user accounts without giving a reason. (Currently they are obliged to have a reason, though the set of acceptable reasons is open-ended.)
- They're no longer obliged to make the contents of a deleted account available to its owner. (There was previously a "reasonable effort" clause to that effect.)
- They're no longer obliged to provide notice of changes to the privacy policy, unless the changes are "substantive". (Currently they are obliged to provide notice of any change.)
- The privacy policy is acquiring a disclaimer that amounts to "this is not true". It actually disclaims the entire privacy policy.
It's a bit questionable if you need a CVS somewhere else, a mailing list archive somewhere else, a patch archive somewhere else, project homepage somewhere else.. whether it's any use to have them a SourceForge at all.. too bad since it really is a great tool, even if sometimes really laggy.
This sure ain't good news for maintainers of small projects.. especially of projects of questionable usefulness..
Software should be free as in speech, but if we also get some free beer, all the better.
Having a useless "Privacy Policy" is a common tactic by commercial web sites to decieve users. It fools most users into thinking that there are protections on thier data due to the fact that the policy exists, or if the user bothers to read it the goal is make it worded such that the lack of protections is concealed.
I was thinking the same thing, but the OP has a point. Why not create a "Sourceforge attic" with an option to exclude the attic from searches? A project would go into the attic if it had less than a minimum number of downloads and/or changes for a period of 6 months.
The attic could be hosted on older, slower servers, or on a configuration that worked well under low demand. Or perhaps it could even be archived on CD or DVD and distributed to various mirrors.
Regardless of how it is maintained, old code is a valuable resource, even if it's just there to let people know about methods that have been tried and failed. How can we learn from mistakes if we can't *see* them?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I think the GNU project is running something called Savannah which is basically sourceforge's engine running on their server. Yep: http://savannah.gnu.org/ Disclaimer: I really know nothing about the service save that it exists, RTFFinePrint. For all I know, there is an "All Your src Are Belong To Us" clause in the user agreement.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Hmmm...IANALY, but what this means is that Sourceforge.net will follow the law. It means that if someone posts copyrighted material without authorization, they will take down that material (as required by law of a common carrier).
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
SourceForge will eventually either need to charge money or will be spun off as a (soon to be bankrupt) spinoff business, leaving VA Software with just the various web sites. The web sites are probably (barely) profitable with the cost-cutting that has been done on them over the past year or so. SourceForge is not profitable, and never can be.
I currently have four projects hosted at SourceForge. I download the CVS web-ball every night in my crontab, and am investigating alternatives. At the moment it appears that any alternative will require developers to fork up money to help pay for the bandwidth. SourceForge itself has too many big (bandwidth) projects to make money even then, because if they charged what the bandwidth costs, most of those projects would end up hosted elsewhere shortly with companies who can hide the bandwidth costs in their accounting noise.
Does this mean that I wish SourceForge ill? Of course not. I just don't see how it can ever be profitable, and thus while I'll use it while it lasts, I'm not banking on it.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
They could take your work and sell it under their own copyright.
Umm, no. You don't sign away your copyright when you host something on Sourceforge. In many cases you don't even have the authority to do so if you wanted to. Sourceforge has the right to do whatever they want with the copy of data on their server, they can delete it and they can delete your account, but they don't own the data you stored there.
But that's okay. "The sky is falling!" is catchier.
I use Savannah and it is a very slick service, well documented (as is Sourceforge), it's also nice to be able to cut time by been able to automatically apply to be a GNU project. The licensing issues are well dealt with (anything as long as its FSF approved) and any questions that I have posted have been answered in hours.
With regards of compatibility there is an offer (when you sign up) to use your existing CVS's data on their systems. The only caveat was that they are far stricter with licensing. So if you use the Sourceforge CVS it should be easy (providing the licence is OK) to transfer to Savannah.
You also geta homepage at: http://www.freesoftware.fsf.org/yourprojectname
Which is adminned via RSYNC or CVS over SSH.
So almost identical to Sourceforge.
It doesn't seem to be as fast as Sourceforge, but this is opionion and I have no metric to support this.
e4 e5
Actually, kernel.org costs a lot more then that - the bandwidth alone, in real dollars would be about 250k per year.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
Hotmail. After avoiding them for ages, I created an account in order to scope Passport.
The "Greet-King" spam I received within a week of creating a hotmail account that I never used resulted in a lengthy bout of mails to their abuse department and to "TrustE" (the supposed industry "watchdog" which is actuallly just a shill to prevent guvmnt action).
Despite MS assurances that my information would not be shared, their insistence remained that Greet-King got my name and email address from me, when it was not at all possible. Despite the statement that "Hotmail will not sell, lease or rent its member lists with any third parties," they refuse to accept any statement on the user's part that the email address and my name were not shared anywhere.
Hence, a "useless" privacy policy. And a deception -- even if it was just a renegade MS employee that pilfered some user names, MS is uninterested in knowing about it. Carelessness that is not, I believe, an uncommon phenomenon.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07