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GIMP, Citing Ad Policies, Moves to FTP Rather Than SourceForge Downloads
Dangerous_Minds writes "GIMP, a free and open source alternative to image manipulation software like Photoshop, recently announced that it will no longer be distributing their program through SourceForge. Citing some of the ads as reasons, they say that the tipping point was 'the introduction of their own SourceForge Installer software, which bundles third-party offers with Free Software packages. We do not want to support this kind of behavior, and have thus decided to abandon SourceForge.' The policy changes were reported back in August by Gluster. GIMP is now distributing their software via their own FTP page instead." Note: SourceForge and Slashdot share a corporate parent.
As a fellow SourceForge user, I was also outraged when I noticed this. SourceForge used to be the go-to place if you had an Open Source project you wanted hosted. They've lacked focus for some time, making all sorts of failed changes that only bloated their surface area without bringing any actual benefit. Perhaps the screws are to them to become profitable. Slashdot's semi-recent foray into HTML5 randomness and video-ads-as-articles shows similar direction.
They've lost a lot of their user base, are bleeding what they've still got, and potential new users are almost universally going to GitHub and the like. It's a bit depressing.
Just saw this today. Guess SourceForge has gone to the dark side. Sad Really.
sf.net was the only project host which still offered release downloads. Not every project can afford a deviated download solutions for all their releases.
Now that sf.net has been compromised, what alternative are there?
It's quite ridiculous considering that the sf.net download mirrors are sponsored.
Indeed. Good on the GIMP guys. Freaked me out the first time I got that on SF.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Maybe Slashdot offer a service where a company pays a fee to guarantee a story makes it to the front page.
Advertisers. /. runs a business model in a similar manner to Google. Put up the content for no direct charge, and sell advertising space.
A business model I happen to like*, since I'd rather not pay a subscription fee for a website's bandwidth, hosting, etc.
* So long as the ads remain in their predictable spaces, and are not intrusive. As soon as obnoxious, flashing, "Download HERE!!!", ads start showing up I will start using adblock.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Funny you mention Paint.Net. Two years ago, I made a very similar comment on the Paint.Net forums about misleading ads as download links. The ad in question was a link for downloading GIMP (bundled with crapware). The support forum volunteers just made fun of me and called me idiot names. Rick Brewster politely explained that he didn't want to lose money on ad revenue and needed the ads positioned very prominently. Search for (in quotes) "Ads on the website" to see the beating I took. So I have to applaud GIMP for taking a stand.
I can't say i've ever downloaded an "installer" from sourceforge, usually i just download actual source code...
On the other hand i always hated how the download link goes to another page which then performs the download in the background on a timer, i have always hated pages like this and its especially bad for something like sourceforge.
I want a link i can cut+paste into wget, i DO NOT want anything to start downloading in my browser unless i explicitly tell it to. Given the nature of sourceforge, many users of the site will be downloading something not to their local box where their browser is running but to a server of some kind. And i would much rather download a file direct to a gigabit colocated box than first download it to my workstation over DSL and then upload it back to the colo box using the pitiful upstream connection we have here.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The worst part about third party installers like sourceforge is that it will ask you "I agree to the terms of agreement to install Ask.com toolbar" and then you uncheck it and it installs anyways. This almost never fails, and it's not fishy English, they install it regardless and blame it on a technical glitch.