Advertising, Bundling, Community and Criticism | Hacker News Reader

Advertising, Bundling, Community and Criticism

sourceforge.net

I think it's important to cut SourceForge some slack. They've provided a really valuable service for a long time. Monetizing on the Internet isn't easy and we shouldn't pretend like it is. It's less easy if you've been around as a free service for a decade. Not to mention having a newly created formidable opponent.

I hope they find a better path to monetization. But this idea that they don't care about users and are doing this "only for the money" is a bit much.

I know from first hand experience that when it comes to monetizing a service that you have to be realistic about your options. Sometimes your best option is somewhere between the ideal scenario and shutting a service down.

It's one thing to attempt to monetize a platform, it's another completely to sell out your users and blur the lines of what's ethical.

Their methods are neither new nor innovative. They have simply been used historically by less-than-honest organizations.

When SourceForge started monetizing by confusing their users, they opened themselves up to criticism.

This was a pilot program with exactly 3 out of 1/3 of a million projects. Opt in. Not a whole-hog switch of anything like, say, Download.com.

Nope. I do not accept this explanation.

They're not the first to look at their product through the eyes of a hacker/technically knowledgable customer. But too many people aren't savvy enough to see past the confusion.

That's the only reason "secondary offerings" ever get installed. It's dishonest and makes the Internet less accessible overall by adding a risk which discourages participation by those who are still learning.

Furthermore, we all know they know what they're doing and their response is to treat those who complained like dolts by "explaining" their facade. Bad! Bad SourceForge!

SourceForge is much like any other OSS project; we want to continue to serve the OSS community which we have been doing for over a decade.

We are working on Apache Allura Incubating, which runs the SourceForge site, and funding will help us continue to contribute there.

This program is a pilot program. Community feedback like this has helped us continue to make adjustments in this program and our site, as well as to provide a process that helps OSS projects fund development.

Best regards,

Daniel Hinojosa - SourceForge Community Manager

My favorite part is how they are trying to rationalize their semi-recent decisions to monetize their platform, while meanwhile on planet Github...

I have a feeling SourceForge won't have much life left in the coming years

Github has $100 million in relatively fresh capital to play with and a profitable enterprise product to draw from to pay for the free users. SourceForge doesn't have a freemium model to draw from. And SourceForge pushes way more bandwidth than Github does thanks to all those hosted binary downloads (Github only added this as a service this year).

This is fair, but paying for their expenses this way is not the way to do it. It's going to kill them in the end, and at best, is going to produce at best, some short term profit while it's community bleeds away. I seriously think if they jusut said, 'Hey, we have bills to pay. Would you be willing to donate?', they might have seen some success. But that is now not a solution, since they basically burned all their goodwill in one fell swoop with this model.

From reading the two (slightly) sensationalist stories on Hacker News, you might think so. The thing is, SF has a larger community built up over many years. And the DevShare program was piloted by literally 3 projects to see how it would work, what the income would be, and what the reaction would be.

You or I could have told them the reaction among the tech savvy, of course. I did after the fact via a detailed set of reasons why it was the wrong approach and how it could be made much better if they were going to go down the offer-based path.

As for the ads that were the other reason GIMP left, these fake download button ads are everywhere. All over Google AdSense and every other graphical ad network. And banning the specific bad ones is like whack-a-mole. That's one of the reasons PortableApps.com only has text-based ads. I'm glad SF set up an email address to report the bad ones, but it's going to be difficult for them to weed them out.

Are binaries usually downloaded directly from SourceForge? I always end up using a mirror provided by a sponsor

> End-users are provided with a clear and transparent installer behavior

Is the opt-in box pre-checked? If it is, then this justification is 100% Grade A Angus bullshit.

We have decades and decades of experience now showing that people don't read dialogs. They just click "Next" until they're through them. If you present a user with an "offer" whose opt-in is pre-checked, you are taking advantage of this behavior, full stop. You know that if someone they trusted was sitting next to them explaining what was about to happen if they checked that box, they would not check it. So you try to sneak it past them by opting them in by default and trusting that they won't notice.

And it works! You can fool a lot of people this way, if you want to. But just because something is effective doesn't mean that it's "clear" or "transparent." And deep down, if you're honest with yourself, you know that.

Their whole existence is based on being free, so they don't have a lot of room to breathe. Reminds me of the old mantra of "If you're not paying, you're not the customer".

Maybe the open source world should take more donations to solve the hosting problem. I'd send money to the EFF to replace bad file hosters in a heartbeat.

"Ad Network partners like Google" but not Google because they don't allow that on their network. If they were sincere, they could switch to more reputable ad networks.

Fake download button ads and the like are on Google AdSense all the time. It's one of the reasons PortableApps.com uses AdSense for text ads only.

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