Sourceforge now using "enhanced" (Ask.com) installer for some downloads | Hacker News Reader

Sourceforge now using "enhanced" (Ask.com) installer for some downloads

sourceforge.net

19 pointsvoltagex_19 comments

If you have a sourceforge account, please let the admin of Filezilla know that this is not very cool: https://sourceforge.net/sendmessage.php?touser=156254

And don't forget to donate something for all these years of improving and maintaining FileZilla. https://filezilla-project.org/donate.php

But you've already donated, right?

I will be shortly. I'll be interested to see a response from the project admin first.

Put it this way, if they'd asked for a few bucks and put up a Flattr or a GitTip, it would have been a no-brainer for me. Flattr especially is really easy.

Flattr is a way for users to feel good but doesn't really make any useful amount of money for the publisher/developer (each Flattr is just pennies and the number shown is the number of Flattrs over all time, years in many cases). It's more an ad for Flattr than anything else. The space on your site would make FAR more money serving an ad.

That depends on the person donating. if the Person as a $10 budget but only flattr's 2 project then each project would be $4.5

but if they flattr'ed 10 projects each project would only get $0.9

Who uses sourceforge? I hope proxy providers will stop supporting sourceforge entirely. On the other hand I don't care about Windows users, they can have all Adware on the world, actually they have :P

Millions of people use SourceForge, many without knowing it. It's one of the only hosts that make available free open source binary download hosting (Github doesn't, Google Code is discontinuing it).

Most Windows users have no adware at all, but you likely already know that.

Not true re: Github. https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software

From the documentation, this seems only geared towards specific ZIPs of what is already on Github and is discussed as such in all press announcements. Basically, an easy way to have Acme 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 zips of code alongside each other as easily accessible zips. Nowhere is it indicated that this is for binary installer releases (EXE/MSI for Windows or DMG for Mac) or that these types of installers and their large associated bandwidth requirements are supported. Is this clarified somewhere else?

from the blog post: "You can also attach binary assets (such as compiled executables, minified scripts, documentation) to a release. Once published, the release details and assets are available to anyone that can view the repository."

Thus losing their last holdout ? I'm not sure what the guys owning sourceforge are thinking those last few years, but boy do they try their best to kill their website ...

They're thinking they want to make enough money to keep the site running. They've found that begging and running ads prior to downloads just isn't enough and that this more aggressive approach might help.

Yes, they will lose you. But I suspect they think they'll gain more in partnerships with popular software than what they loose. Especially if you were a leech.

It's opt-in, so it doesn't really affect the developers whether they want it or not. It's the users they're hurting if anyone.

For the curious, this is an optional program at SourceForge being offered to developers as a way to monetize their work. The developer needs to specifically request it. SourceForge gets a cut, so does the developer. The installer is their first stab at this process and is using the bundling technology from Ask.com. As offer-based installers go, this one is about as good as it gets. It makes a single offer and has an Accept and Decline button with the user selecting whichever one they want (not a pre-checked box accepting the offer above a Next/Continue button). If accepted, the installer installs the offered software and it gets a standard entry in Windows' Add/Remove Programs that works as expected. If declined, the installer continues. The installer then downloads the originally-requested software.

The two issues with the current installer are that (1) it is served in place of the requested file with no indication that a substitution is made as the user downloads and (2) it requests admin rights before it starts downloading the software, which can be a security issue. Roberto (who posted the article) has stated that they are working on #1 in terms of the text shown on SourceForge as you select to download and download. As for #2, there may be some ways to rework the installer so this is not an issue. I'll mention it to him when I speak to him.

SourceForge has one other revenue-share program with developers where you place the SourceForge-branded download buttons on your own website that link to your downloads on SourceForge and you get a small cut of the ad revenue made from the download page.

If I recall correctly, SourceForge has been losing money for a few years now. Dice Holdings picked up SourceForge and Slashdot while Geek.com kept ThinkGeek.com, so they are now separate entities. These new experiments are attempts to get SourceForge to be self-sustaining/profitable. Ad revenue alone likely won't cut it.

Unfortunately, Google Code, Github and others don't offer the full breadth of services that SourceForge does for open source projects. Google Code, Github, and others have all ditched binary downloads, so SourceForge is one of the only providers to make binary downloads available to Windows and Mac user at no charge. This is why SourceForge is popular for real apps (FileZilla, Pidgin, PortableApps.com, etc) and Github is popular for components (node.js, jquery, rails, etc). The code zips available at other providers are of no use to end users.

As full disclosure, I run PortableApps.com, one of SourceForge's largest projects pushing quite a few TBs of downloads through their mirror network. We make use of the SF-branded download buttons revenue share program but do not make use of nor have any plans to use the "enhanced" installers. Everything I've discussed here is already publicly available, I just thought it would be handy to have in one place.

Nobodys blaming SF for trying to make money. But for, as you said, THE OS binary distributioner, it is kinda suicide to remove the possibility to verify your download. No more checksums, just trust our "enhanced" installer.

Besides, its just cheap and crude to close the comments for the SF blog post, just after some people started with some real arguments.

Just wanted to add, since many people dont know, last month GitHub added a new feature called "Releases" that does allow you to attach binaries for projects

https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software

In all the documentation and press materials, they're still referred to as zips, though. Do you know if they support proper uploads and downloads of EXE, MSI and DMGs directly? Github used to support that a while back and purposely disabled it. Google Code has recently begun disabling it due to 'abuse'.

Thanks for PortableApps.

It's the redirect and the inability to download the real exe for offline install that I have a problem with.

I also have a huge problem with granting a glorified curl wrapper full administrative rights.

You're welcome for PortableApps.com.

I'm dropping Roberto a note about the possibility of doing a fully-integrated installer for really basic installs (NSIS-based, based on PortableApps.com code, using really basic INIs so folks can do an installer with the ease of a zip) as well as an NSIS drop-in to have the recommendations appear on a given page of an NSIS installer (by far the most popular installer used in open source software) so folks can use their existing NSIS installers and custom code for advanced installers. It'd be open source, of course, and both would contain the full installer on the initial download. This would help with security concerns and allow offline installs (possibly even skipping the offer if we code it to detect being offline) as well as silent and automated installs.

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