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Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

You should then consider a better host. SourceForge is clearly a scamware host now; maybe ever since Dice.com took over. And to be honest, just seeing a file hosted on SourceForge casts doubts on the quality of the app.

- Most users just click OK for installers, it is like the EULA

- I am yet to see a toolbar that does anything useful to anybody; other than make their system slower and buggy. I hold a very low opinion of people (like Ask.com) who bundle things with the clear knowledge that most people are unknowingly installing their app/toolbar. Much worse than spammers.

With your extensive experience with user behavior, it is interesting that you see this differently.

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> And to be honest, just seeing a file hosted on SourceForge casts doubts on the quality of the app.

I couldn't agree more. Whenever a session of searching for a solution ultimately lands me on a sourceforge page, I feel a pit form in my stomach. When it happens it typically means one of two things, often both: I took a terribly wrong turn somewhere, and/or I am in for a world of hurt.

Contrast this with finding myself on a github page, which very often signals success.

My hypothesis is that a sourceforge page signals that the author is dated, the author has abandoned the software, or the author doesn't care much for the users.

github signals fly by night to many.

I have to nod on this. Github is a great indicator for developers mostly, but from any user point of view, having a source dump is next to useless.

And by user, I do not mean a dumb user. I would consider myself the user of a library if I'm not planning to contribute. I can only contribute meaningfully to a dozen of OSS projects; for the others I'm pretty much an ordinary user. In that case I care much more about introduction, documentation and stable releases. Github is pretty much useless by itself in these cases, and the idea that you can just dump a half-assed readme and "call it a day" is something that I've only seen since github became popular.

Even if I'm not a contributor, GitHub hosting of projects is for me very valuable, as I can sneak peek quickly at the implementation. Many projects also have samples and good tests and taking a quick look at the implementation (and I'm talking about randomly selecting files and opening them), not to mention the list of commits, can tell you a lot of things about how the project is being maintained, about quality and so on.

Developers should really stop behaving like dumb users.

Github to a user page, definitely. If it's an organization page I usually feel differently.

I really think designating torrenting as the primary method of downloading big binaries or really anything big is the way to go for OSS projects. I guarantee you more than a handful of people will offer seeding without asking anything in return. I certainly would be happy to seed any OSS project for a long time, I often have VPSs that are not being used (and in a way that really bugs me -- I'm paying money for things I'm not using fully. So I'm actually often on the lookout to see what OSS stuff I can seed).

Have a host as a secondary backup, for people who won't want to torrent.

You can host the backup http version on S3 and get Bittorrent automatically: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#What_is_the_BitTorrent_TM_pro...

S3 isn't the cheapest for really big bandwidth though.

(I shall ignore the toolbar installation matter; that has been discussed at length in the linked thread and there is little value in continuing that here.)

> You should then consider a better host.

Very well then; step one: identify a better host where PortableApps.com can get over 50TB per month for free. I'm not aware of any other than SourceForge which would do such a thing and John does not have the money to spend on commercial rates for such bandwidth. (Incidentally, donations are always welcome at PortableApps.com, because the rest of the infrastructure does still cost money, and quite a considerable amount.)

I get that. But somebody must be paying for 50TB, right? It is paid for by users who inadvertently installed bundled *-ware.

Edit: I am not saying portableapps.com is at fault here for using this free facility. SourceForge is, for their business model.

Note that it is completely optional for a project to participate however.

No, it is not. It is mostly paid for by ads on the website. There are only a handful of SourceForge projects trying out this new, 100% optional, offer-based installer. PortableApps.com is not one of them. Bundling 3rd party offers is not permitted within PortableApps.com Format apps.

>identify a better host where PortableApps.com can get over 50TB per month for free

With those amounts of traffic for SF's larger projects I wonder how and if one could build a competing website for hosting binary FOSS today and have it be profitable without resorting to shady tactics. Clearly, making the projects themselves pay is not an option.

As for SF, even before the installer business under the current management it had really misleading banners everywhere. I doubt they would have resorted to those of they could have been comfortably profitable with AdWords.

One site that would have had the bandwidth would have been Google Code. But they just dropped binary hosting. And they didn't support projects that used multiple licenses (PortableApps.com has tons of apps under every open source license).

The only other one is Github as they're growing and have $100m they raised earlier this year. They added in binary hosting as "Releases" but it's relatively new (this year) and after they killed binary hosting last year with no path to move to, I'd worry about it happening again as Github stabilizes its product offerings.

What about bitbucket with the downloads feature?

I can't seem to find any details on it on their site (it's absent from Features and Documentation) and nothing relevant came up in a quick Google search.

It's there. When viewing your project's details, you've got a tab called "Downloads". You can then upload stuff like binaries, and I quote from that interface: "Add any file that you would like to make available to your users, such as app binaries"

Ah. I don't have an account. So, to me, there's nothing there at all. And if it's not documented (not even a mention in features or the documentation) other than just existing in the admin interface, I don't know that I'd trust it to be there next week.

> - Most users just click OK for installers, it is like the EULA

This installer specifically has a separate page for the offer with a big Accept and Decline button along with a What's This link in between that links to a page explaining it.

> - I am yet to see a toolbar that does anything useful to anybody

They also offer trial versions of certain software like antivirus and were working on getting other software on board last I chatted with them.

Like I said, I'm not involved in the process at present and do not participate in the optional bundling program. Bundling 3rd party offers is prohibited within PortableApps.com Format.

Antivirus software is the perfect illustration of snake-oil. Antiviruses don't actually protect the user from anything, they just use tons of resources while making loud notifications, to make the user think she's continually under threat and oh look, this piece of shit is actually worth something.

I've got an old PC at home, with a ten year old installation of Windows XP, on which I play games. It never had an antivirus active, I just run ClamAV on it every couple of years. It was never virused either. My wife's laptop on the other hand is perpetually virused, in spite of the commercial antiviruses that she tried. That's because those antiviruses don't do shit for her, or for the hundreds of millions of users that get tricked into paying racketeering taxes.

I really love the "Waaa, facts I don't like" downvotes the best. :)

Note the only thing particularly special that SourceForge did however is the "bait and switch" part where they change the filename downloaded.

That was one of the things I brought up with them and offered up a solution that would not require an offer-based installer that then downloaded the actual file the user wanted. It would be open source and based on work I've done with PortableApps.com for several years.

Unfortunatly your damn right. I would not trust anything coming from Sourceforge new ,yet it used to be THE place for open source projects...

Is their an opensource hosting service that provides a build service for binaries ? a little bit like Travis but just for builds , that would build bins for you and make it available to download ?

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