GIMP, Citing Ad Policies, Moves to FTP Rather Than SourceForge Downloads 336
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.
good move (Score:5, Informative)
Haven't been impressed by SourceForge's recent policy of late- especially when I unclick the 'free software' offers attached to each download, yet they install anyway!
If it worked for CNet's downloads.com for Windows (Score:4, Informative)
then certainly the open source community would appreciate bundled bullshit too!
Re:who cares (Score:5, Informative)
People who don't want to have to pay a monthly Photoshop bill care...
Not. Acceptable. (Score:5, Informative)
Please inform your "corporate parent" that installer hijacking is a dick move.
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
It's easy enough for me to click the Decline button instead of Accept (I'm one of the minority of users who reads things like that), but the installer doesn't even work that well. I was using Windows Remote Desktop to connect with a client's server, and the connection was pretty spotty. The server desktop was more like a slideshow. So instead of trying to edit code directly, I decided to upload all of their code to an FTP server, edit it locally, and then download the changes. So, I go to install Filezilla on the remote server. The entire SourceForge site is a mess. My remote desktop connection is already a slideshow and then SF is showing me Flash ads on every page, including the download pages, and when I finally punch through that mess and get the installer which I know is coming, I run the thing and it tells me I don't have an internet connection. Which is interesting, since I'm running the installer via remote desktop. Maybe it uses a port that was blocked on the network. After a few futile attempts to find a non-installer link on SF, I jumped back to my local PC and found a usable URL that I pasted into the remote desktop session to download. At least Filezilla is hosted on download.filezilla-project.org, but I'm sure there are a lot of projects hosted on SF that don't have a great alternative place to download.
Dice completely ruined the reputation of SourceForge. Slashdot isn't completely in the shitter yet, but I feel like it's inevitable. Well, we had a good run, anyway.
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
"Sourceforge is garbage now."
So is Slashdot. Neither are an unbiased, open community anymore and as such no longer serve their intended purpose. Perhaps that was the goal all along.
Here is another bit of information that needs to be thrown in the mix.
From the Dice Holdings Inc. Third Quarter 2013 Results posted here:
http://www.diceholdingsinc.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=211152&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1869460&highlight=
"For the quarter ended September 30, 2013, Tech & Clearance segment revenues increased 12% year-over-year to $37.0 million, or 70% of Dice Holdings' consolidated revenues. Slashdot Media contributed $3.7 million to revenues in the third quarter of 2013, as compared to $0.8 million in the same period a year ago, while The IT Job Board® added $1.1 million to Tech & Clearance revenues in the quarter after writing down $0.4 million of acquired revenue. Third quarter revenues in our Dice.com service increased slightly compared to the prior year's third quarter, while ClearanceJobs.com posted a 5% year-over-year decline in revenues due to sequestration..."
When growth in all other sectors remained relatively minimal, revenue from Slashdot increased roughly four-fold. How, in the last year alone, has Slashdot managed to bring in that much more revenue? Who handed over nearly 3 million dollars this last year?
Re:who cares (Score:4, Informative)
There are lots of other low cost pixel editors that compete with Photoshop. Since Adobe's moron move to the "Creative Cloud" (which may represent a state of mind among Adobe executives rather than a description of the system which is simply Software As A Service) thousands of photographers have been ditching PS. Corel's Paintshop Pro, while commercial software is less expensive than PS. Paintshop even does layers, 16 bit and CMYK output.
Re:unacceptable (Score:4, Informative)
It Gets worse.
Just about every popular Open Source program out there is Drive by Kidnapped. Just search for any Open source program on google and bing and see what I mean.
VLC media player, 7Zip and firefox seem to be the popular drive-by bait and switch downlaods I seen. There's even a chromium browser ripoff that impersonates google chrome, albeit with a square chrome logo instead of a round one.
Re:good move (Score:5, Informative)
Haven't been impressed by SourceForge's recent policy of late- especially when I unclick the 'free software' offers attached to each download, yet they install anyway!
Gee, that happens to you too? And here I was thinking that it was just Operator Error on my part.
Try Savannah - The FSF version of Sourceforge (Score:3, Informative)
The FSF run their own project hosting website at http://savannah.nongnu.org/ [nongnu.org]
I suspect it's about to become rather more popular.
Re:Alternate host? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.berlios.de/ [berlios.de] - Has been around forever, and is somewhat popular.
Or you could check the list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_software_hosting_facilities [wikipedia.org]
Re:Isn't the installer opt-in? (Score:4, Informative)
This post [ycombinator.com] (found in the comments of TFA) contains more details. The bundling only happens if the project owner requests it. And the user can reject installing anything other than the application they came for.
I still think it's a bad idea though: apparently some projects did accept this (they get a cut of the revenue) and as a result users might become wary of downloading things from SourceForge. Trust is easier lost than gained. In fact, some users are so paranoid about installers that we've been releasing our Windows build of openMSX as a ZIP file in addition to an installer for several years now.
Re:unacceptable (Score:4, Informative)
I believe he is talking about the "Ads related to vlc" which are at the top of the google search. In my search I get two:
Download VLC Player 2013 - Vlc.downloadster.org
and
VLC Player 2012 Download - VLC - Get The Latest Version
I am not clicking them but I am sure they contain bogus versions with crapware attached.
Re:BT (Score:2, Informative)
What's funny about this, is that part of what *sucks* about sourceforge's download pages is that they are littered with the same kind of ads that bittorrent sites have (I know, I know, they can host the torrent from their own tracker, not some pirate thing)
You get to a download page and there are ads that scream things like "DOWNLOAD NOW", "CLICK HERE TO INSTALL", etc.
Frequent/savvy users are able to figure this out, but when you tell your parents that they can get this free photo editor, they end up with the same damn crapware on their computer as they would have had if they just went ahead and tried to pirate photoshop.
What I do, and what I tell BT novices, is look for "magnet link" or an icon of a magnet. 100% of torrent sites have the magnet download option, and it's always called that way. It's unambiguous, in addition to the other advantages of using magnet links.
Re:good move (Score:5, Informative)
Adblock, removes all the bullshit ads and leaves only the real download button...
If ads are intentionally trying to mislead then i have absolutely no intention of supporting them.
Re:Good (Score:5, Informative)
Re:BT (Score:4, Informative)
I didn't see you being made fun of, I see a newcomer to a forum expressing a valid but ultimately unaccepted point, being told (yes, a bit harshly by one person who then apologized) that that's the way the developer wants it on his website, and in the end, there were no hard feelings expressed from anyone on the site.
If that's what you consider a beat-down, how have you survived the wild west of Slashdot??