SourceForge Appeals To Readers For Help Nixing Bad Ad Actors

Last week, we mentioned that the GIMP project had elected to leave SourceForge as its host, citing SourceForge's advertising policies. SourceForge (which shares a parent company with Slashdot) has released a statement about those policies, addressing in particular both ads that are confusing in themselves and their revenue-sharing system called DevShare, based on the provision of third-party software along with users' downloads. Among other things, the SF team is appealing to users to help them find and block misleading ads, and has this to say about the additional downloads: "The DevShare program has been designed to be fully transparent. The installation flow has no deceptive steps, all offers are fully disclosed, and the clear option to completely decline the offer is always available. All uninstallation procedures are exhaustively documented, and all third party offers go through a comprehensive compliance process to make sure they are virus and malware free."

SourceForge has shown it can't be trusted.

[Animats]

SourceForge has shown it can't be trusted. The only way they could regain trust at this point is by legally committing themselves to never bundling anything with an installer, and using an open source installer. Instead, their terms [slashdotmedia.com] still read "We reserve the right at our sole discretion and at any time to ... change the terms and conditions of this Agreement."

Sorry, SourceForge. You got caught. Promising you won't do it again isn't good enough. That's just PR spin.

Fuck Advertising.

[Anonymous Coward]

And those who promote, err advertise it.

Cesspool of reality.

zenlessyank was here..

PS. Fuck your karma ratings slashdot....

Re:Just another download site now

[i kan reed]

Have you been to beta.slashdot.org [slashdot.org]? It's only a matter of time until they deploy it and I'm gone.

Re:Don't make users opt-out

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

Currently in the Pilot phase, we only have 3 projects participating in the DevShare program all of which explicitly opted-in. This represents 3 out of 300,000+ projects in our entire catalog. This is a 100% opt-in program for the developer, and we want to reassure you that we will NEVER bundle offers with any project without the developers consent

Sounds pretty opt-in to me.

Too late, Adforge

[fluor2]

You ate too much of your own cake.
The migration to other services has begun.
You might never recover from this.
May it be a lesson for all other "free" services trying to make hasty profit.

Re:Missing the point

[mysidia]

I couldn't believe it when I installed some software from Sourceforge a while back and ended up with a malware toolbar in my browser

According to This [sourceforge.net]; it is never done without the developer opting in.

In July 2013, we launched a pilot version of an opt-in revenue-sharing program called DevShare. DevShare is a partnership program offered to SourceForge developers to turn downloads into a source of revenue for them, by bundling their applications with third parties’ offers.

...

This is a 100% opt-in program for the developer, and we want to reassure you that we will NEVER bundle offers with any project without the developers consent. The DevShare program has been designed to be fully transparent.