14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that hosting your project on Sourceforge is becoming a point of contention these days after yet another developer chose to leave the website due to reports that applications are being infused with adware before being offered for download.
Sourceforge is a website that allows developers to host and distribute their applications, but in the last six months two major projects have decided to pull their files from there. The website is host to many open source projects and there are a great deal of people that are counting on it.
Now, if you happen to open the Sourceforge website for PyDAW (an open source graphical application that allows users to create beautiful audio tracks) you will notice a very simple text, “The project has moved, see download.txt for details.” This happens from time to time, but if you download the text file you will find that it comes with a very interesting message.
PyDAW is no longer available on Sourceforge and official downloads will only be available here in tarballed source code format only: https://github.com/j3ffhubb/pydaw/releases.
“The rationale for leaving Sourceforge is that Dice has turned Sourceforge into a intrusive-advertisement-ridden website and started paying developers to include Ask.com malware into Windows installers, to the extent that it's no better than any of the crappy Windows freeware sites.”
“I encourage everybody to send a clear message to Dice that perverting the open source ecosystem is going to result in less ad revenue, not more. I recommend Github or Google Code,” said the developer of PyDAW.
To fill in some blanks, we need to specify that Dice is the company behind Sourceforge (it has nothing to do with the gaming studio with the same name) and the reference made by the PyDAW developer is about a problem with Filezilla, which seems to have been straightened out.
This problem would not have attracted too much attention if another very similar issue hadn’t occurred only a few months ago. In November 2013, the GIMP developers accused Sourceforge of bundling their application with another installer and a number of other apps that had nothing to do with the project.
This prompted the GIMP developers to remove their files from Sourceforge and look for another place to host them. At first this was only applicable to Windows binaries, but now even the source files have been removed.
For now, the Filezilla developers haven’t done anything as drastic, but you can follow an interesting discussion on their forum.