Popular Software projects leave Sourceforge

The admin of the popular NotePad++ text editor announced today that the project would leave SourceForge as a response to what happened in past weeks.

(by onin Internet – Last Update: June 15, 2015)

What may be even more troubling for Sourceforge is that uBlock — and all of its spin-offs and forks — is now blocking access to the site by default.

The software project hosting website Sourceforge started to offer a new monetization option to projects hosted on the site in mid-2013 when it introduced install-wrappers which enabled projects to add third-party offers to installers on Windows to earn revenue from software installations.

The move back then was controversial but opt-in which meant that only select downloads on the site were wrapped in the installer.

The new monetization option along with advertisement on the site that was sometimes deceptive in nature as it features download links and buttons prominently, turned several projects away from Sourceforge back then.

This changed recently — briefly — when Sourceforge started to take over abandoned projects on the site to add download wrappers to project downloads.

Projects that have been abandoned on Sourceforge are not necessarily abandoned completely. This is for instance the case for the popular image editor Gimp which was simply moved to a host of its own from where files are now served to users.

Mirrors of popular projects that moved away from Sourceforge are kept on the site however and those were then taken over by the company running the site.

Sourceforge quickly stopped the practice after reports emerged on various sites on the Internet about the company’s business practice. While Sourceforge reacted quickly, it was clear almost immediately that damage was done not only to the public image of Sourceforge but also in regards to developer relations.

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One comment to “Popular Software projects leave Sourceforge”
  1. Hi,

    Its great to see this happening to this site. What about other sites, such as cnet.com, etc are doing this practice of wrappers as well. I avoid these and other sites due to all the extra baggage we don’t need or want.

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