Hello friends,
I’ve received this mail this morning:
Hi David,
Hope all is well. My name is Logan Abbott and I am the president of SourceForge. I am also a huge fan of G’MIC.
I wanted to reach out to see if there was anything we could do to entice you to make SourceForge the primary download host for G’MIC.
Nothing would change on your end, other than changing the download links on your [website](https://gmic.eu/download.html) to point to SourceForge.
If you were willing to do that we would give you all of the following:
* We would send you a $250 donation
* We would put G’MIC on the SourceForge homepage for 3 months
* We would put G’MIC (or the company or product of your choice) in the SourceForge Newsletter that goes out to 500,000 people
* We would build a donation button on the G’MIC SourceForge download page
* We would publish an article about G’MIC or the topic of your choice in the SourceForge articles section
In addition to all of the above, you would get personal support from me if you ever had any issues with SourceForge at all.
Let me know if you’re interested or if you have any other thoughts. We’d love to be the main download host for such an awesome project.
If not, no worries, but I love G’MIC so I figured I’d ask. And at the very least I just wanted to introduce myself and thank you for G’MIC, and just let you know that I am a fan, and I am here if you ever need anything.
Thanks,
Logan Abbott
President
SourceForge
What do you think about it?
TBH, my first impression is rather negative. At the same time, for the release of G’MIC version 3.1.1, I’ve decided to stop hosting G’MIC binaries on Fosshub.
Perhaps this is an opportunity to try Sourceforge again (G’MIC was hosted on Sourceforge a few years ago).
What do you think?
If their goal is to profit from hosting g’mic, are you OK with that?
Potential for a bigger audience might be something you want though. I tend to avoid sourceforge due to their past, so I don’t know whether things changed there.
Not only strange and desperate but awkward and clingy. No finesse at all. I wanted to reach out to see if there was anything we could do to entice you to make SourceForge the primary download host for G’MIC. No.
From what I have heard, not only has sf been languishing, it has had security incidents and untrustworthy software on it.
Yesterday I started to use ChatGTP. When I submit the following:
sourceforge invites david to host g’mic on their site
it answers:
I’m sorry, but I cannot provide real-time or current information as my knowledge is limited to what was available up until September 2021. Up to that date, SourceForge was a platform that hosted open-source software projects, and G’MIC (GREYC’s Magic for Image Computing) was indeed hosted on SourceForge.
If SourceForge has sent an invitation to David Tschumperlé or any other developer to host G’MIC on their site after my last knowledge update in September 2021, I would not have that information.
Is there anything else I can assist you with today?
Was it SourceForge, which bundled adware in some free / open source software packages download from there?
It might have been some other download site also. It was years ago and could not found any reliable looking information from this any more.
edit: One possible link to those old sins SourceForge tried to do. I stopped trusting them after one of this kind of cases. Now I always try to get free software downloaded from some other place.
It is all about making money, It is worth looking at the ‘revenue’ section of wikipedia, a bit old, still plenty money stated. Dare I say, $250 is peanuts.
Sourgeforge still exists? I thought after it was taken over and downloads got ‘infected’ with extra stuff the devs didn’t put in their packages it quickly died after.
Haven’t seen it in years. Emails like this smell like desperation .
Did you reach out on twitter or other platforms to see if more projects got the same thing ? They can’t put every project on the homepage for 3 months .
… and who ever visits the homepage. You get there for a certain project, not to discover new stuff.
Anyway, if it was my project I would ignore and, and maybe see this as a good time to send an EU privacy request to let them remove everything they have of me.
But it isn’t , and its your choice and all the respect for that!
Self-hosting a Gitea instance is also always a possibility :).
We (GIMP) had a sour experience with SF back in the day and moved away from using them at all for hosting:
At the time they were serving up ads around our downloads (including those shitty, malicious “DOWNLOAD HERE” green button ads) as well as “packaging” their own installer around ours and “offering” other software to install at the same time.
Sourceforce use to be my go to when it comes to downloading open source programs, but they no longer are (lots of reasons why, but mainly they do mix commercial with open source. Have no problem with that, but, I would stick to keeping independent (i.e, gmic.eu), David, but that’s me. You have to do you of course, but then, again, why tout being Open Source when you do commercial endeavors. Of course this may no longer be the case, but again, I don’t download from them any longer anyway except a few programs and there haven’t been updates to those programs in a while, now). Believe GIMP left Sourceforce as well so best to ask a GIMP developer why they did so.
