> This was so mind-boggling even at the time that SourceForge thought ...

They'd been recently bought by a shitty company called DICE that also owned ummm... CNet or Download.com, or some other similar place with lots of downloads for Windows users:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice.com

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge#Adware_controversy

That company already served ~malware~ sorry "bundled third party offers" with their windows downloads, and figured they'd be able to copy-n-paste that approach to popular OSS downloads.

That's not how it played out however, as some of us actually give a shit about things like that. ;)