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.

1. 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.)
2. 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.)
3. 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.)
4. 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.)
5. The privacy policy is acquiring a disclaimer that amounts to "this is not true". It actually disclaims the entire privacy policy.

Comments

Re:What are the chances ...

[istartedi]

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?

Sourceforge.net not a viable business

[Eric Green]

From what I can tell, Sourceforge.net is not a viable business. It spends millions of dollars each year on bandwidth, sysadmins, and server farm in order to get maybe half a million dollars in contract fees. IBM is not in the business of losing money, and neither is RedHat. Neither needs SourceForge for PR purposes.

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.

Re:I dunno ...

[aka-ed]

Can you name a site for reference?

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.