I'd like to add that I partially regret singing up for a Slashdot account to write this article. I've had to unsubscribe myself from 5 mailing lists since the article was created last week. It's becoming pretty obvious that SF isn't the only snake-oil merchant in town.
Thanks for posting it, @Soulskill. Better late than never. I'll support you a bit in saying that the readers are focusing on the wrong point. It is the FOSS malware bundling which is the real issue here. The misrepresentation of a product against the author's/community's will is THE issue. Stop trolling the journalist, he's not the one installing malware on your computer, SF is.
Offering a great product for free should be good enough to drive the traffic and ad revenue that SF needs. Taking a sh** on these great projects does nothing but alienate SF from the very community that helped it gain notoriety in the first place. Sure this is old news, but 1,000 malware installations a day aren't old news. 1,000 malware installations a day should be criminal.
Coincidentally -- the day after posting this article -- a colleague of mine made a similar mistake of installing OpenOffice from a high-ranking search result and is now dealing with the consequences. Long term, I'm not sure how we fix these bait-and-switch problems, but @Soulskill getting the word out is a good start.
On a personal note... I manage the downloads for a QT-based project known as LMMS and we too feared the day that our installers would be compromized. In anticipation of this, LMMS has moved everything off of SF hosting. This took almost a year as it included forums, downloads, bug tracker, et al. We we very fortunate to get corporate sponsoring, but not all projects have success in this regard.
On a personal-side-note, I'd like to add that I've been happy enough with the services over at GitHub that I've chosen them for some of non-free projects (private, paid repositories). Is this not how revenue **should** be generated? Should the exchange of good, honest services for cash not be the norm? Should preying on the innocent and invading privacy, installing viruses for those that would least suspect it NOT be ostracized? SF has become a predator against the unsuspecting.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to add that I partially regret singing up for a Slashdot account to write this article. I've had to unsubscribe myself from 5 mailing lists since the article was created last week. It's becoming pretty obvious that SF isn't the only snake-oil merchant in town.
Thanks for posting it, @Soulskill. Better late than never. I'll support you a bit in saying that the readers are focusing on the wrong point. It is the FOSS malware bundling which is the real issue here. The misrepresentation of a product against the author's/community's will is THE issue. Stop trolling the journalist, he's not the one installing malware on your computer, SF is.
Offering a great product for free should be good enough to drive the traffic and ad revenue that SF needs. Taking a sh** on these great projects does nothing but alienate SF from the very community that helped it gain notoriety in the first place. Sure this is old news, but 1,000 malware installations a day aren't old news. 1,000 malware installations a day should be criminal.
Coincidentally -- the day after posting this article -- a colleague of mine made a similar mistake of installing OpenOffice from a high-ranking search result and is now dealing with the consequences. Long term, I'm not sure how we fix these bait-and-switch problems, but @Soulskill getting the word out is a good start.
On a personal note... I manage the downloads for a QT-based project known as LMMS and we too feared the day that our installers would be compromized. In anticipation of this, LMMS has moved everything off of SF hosting. This took almost a year as it included forums, downloads, bug tracker, et al. We we very fortunate to get corporate sponsoring, but not all projects have success in this regard.
On a personal-side-note, I'd like to add that I've been happy enough with the services over at GitHub that I've chosen them for some of non-free projects (private, paid repositories). Is this not how revenue **should** be generated? Should the exchange of good, honest services for cash not be the norm? Should preying on the innocent and invading privacy, installing viruses for those that would least suspect it NOT be ostracized? SF has become a predator against the unsuspecting.