But I'd add one other big problem for open source: "anti-marketing", in the form of aggregating trolls.
I don't have to Google far to find sites that apparently just crawl SourceForge and dig up whatever crap they can automatically generate ad-ridden pages for. A lot of direct harm to projects comes from trolls:
- They don't properly credit, and certainly don't link to, the page that they crawled (e.g. SourceForge). So users have no way of knowing that a more complete and authoritative source exists.
- They often don't "re-crawl", so within a matter of months they're advertising something extremely old.
- They usually don't have all the details quite right. So their pages seem "authentic", yet are wrong in critical places (such as, system requirements; I've seen things as stupid as non-Windows programs that "require Windows XP").
- Their robots are sloppy. For instance, I've seen them create a "what's new" page that completely misinterprets the original source release notes, resulting in a couple of nonsensical bullet points. This makes it seem like the software maintainer is retarded.
- They give no direct control to project owners. Not only is there no way to update a page, but even if there were, the site has no way of knowing that the person contacting them is the true maintainer of the software.
Whichever one of these trolls becomes king of Google will do the most damage.