Is it just parasitism under a thin layer of FOSS-friendliness?
I have read thatā¦ and I still donāt understand. It seems they pick popular FOSS but these usually already have a download site. So what is their added value?
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Yeah, looks like they are in it for the ads. But it seems to be more for windows usersā¦ maybe they are not as good in googling/duckduckgoān
@Ofnuts I agree with you; the link is for other people. It is an interesting read; it isnāt doing itself a favour by trying to justify its existence. I guess the site is for exposure and discovery but I think we do a better job of that here. 
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Well, it would. But as it seems they are hosting the downloads themselves, it does raise a red flag for me. If it was only about easy discovery, it would be better to only link to the project page / the downloads there.
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Definitely, what I meant was that even lousy sites have their role in discovery. When less tech savvy people start asking questions about their apps, hopefully they would get search hits that direct them to the primary sources.
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They sound very reasonable (if they indeed do what they outline on the about page). Advertising isnāt inherently bad, and if theyāre picky about the ads/ad platform, it can certainly be done ethically.
On a side note, we donāt do advertising here because we donāt like it. We rely on the kindness of our users to pay our bills, so thanks to all our supporters!
What!, no darktable, no Rapid Photo Downloader, noā¦erā¦I could go on.
@Ofnuts we had some parasites both inside and outside but weāre clean now. We noticed that a lot of people abuse and hide behind FOSS or Open Source in general.
To answer your question guys, yes what you read on the āAbout Usā page is who we are.
It means that we are focused on helping free projects, something that you guys canāt see from the outside (speaking of added value) and weāre just getting started.
I am sorry that you guys see us as a software inventory, those are about to become history soon.
Regards,
FossHub team
That is the mystery to meā¦ Helping how?
By doing the opposite of any other similar site until we reach our final goal or die.
Your question should be: is there anything that FossHub doesnāt do to help free projects?
Is this still a mystery to you?
Sorry, butā¦ yes, it is.
To explain why it is not clear, letās think for a moment that this is a job interview.
The recruiter asks: āWhy should we hire you?ā
Candidate replies: āI am better than all the others, 'cause I do not do any of their mistakes!ā
Recruiter is still not convinced: āOk, but how do you think you can help our company?ā
Candidate answers: āBy doing the opposite of any other person you can hire, until Iāve either finished my job or I am firedā¦ā
Now Iām asking you: would you hire this person?
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Fair enough.
You guys mentioned ads. As you saw, thereās a single ad. I think we explained why we use that single ad; to gather some funds.
What do we do with the funds? We use them to support free projects.
How do we support them? By buying bandwidth, equipment/hardware, third-party services that are being used by such projects.
Other projects have different needs, and we also help them financially.
That being said, by simply visiting our site or recommending us you are in fact doing a favor to free projects that need help.
Any specific examples?
Examples:
Bandwidth - from CDNs
Storage - from CDNs
Dedicated Servers - required for different operations such as backup storage
VPS - to serve specific custom services
Third party services: DNS, DDoS, Mail, etc.
Raising funds - project meetings, acquiring software licenses, hardware, books, other IT related, etc.
I mean examples of projects. Which FOSS projects have you already helped?
Well, for several reasons we canāt disclose this, but I can show you just an example as it was public:
What we stated there is that we are going to continue supporting qBitorrent despite that ad ban. From a financial perspective, there is no gain for us. Thatās just a single example. Therefore you should think again if we act as a parasite or not.
This answer makes me even more suspiciousā¦
- you keep things hiddenā¦ (the āOā in "FOSS " is for āOpenā, remember?)
- your answer is totally misleadingā¦ You are just mentioning a problem you had with your qBittorrent download page. This doesnāt explain what kind of āhelpā you brought to qBittorrent (which can be downloaded on SourceForge, so doesnāt really depend on you).
Ce que lāon conƧoit bien sāĆ©nonce clairement,
Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisƩment.
You can keep being suspicious, and you can even hate FossHub, that is a normal feeling.
- No, thatās another discussion. We explained that on our āAbout Usā section. Read the āControversyā and āNot Satisfiedā points.
- The answer was the best I could find except that you are unable to understand what this means for an open source project. You are also ignorant because if you wouldāve looked better, you would notice that almost all projects that use FossHub also use other services/sites/mirrors. We never tried to impose anyone to use only FossHub, unlike other services that use such a non-disclosure contract and require exclusivity.
The whole point of the post is that you started accusing FossHub of being a parasite site which is so untrue.