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Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

(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.)

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>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.

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.

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