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Comment by jbigelow76 | Hacker News Reader

I wish Sourceforge would have come to that realization.

Anytime I search for something that tends to be older enterprisy-ish code and it shows up in Sourceforge (iText for example) I can never figure out what the hell is and isn't an ad. If I didn't know better I would suspect a malware vendor purchased it and turned it into a honeypot for lazy devs.

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Yes, this, a thousand times yes. The transparently-malicious abuse of ads on SourceForge is a tragedy and it's been that way for years and years. It is a honeypot for lazy people (or those without meticulous attention to detail) and the malware venders didn't even have to purchase the site. SourceForge just rolled over and let them do it.

Dalton Caldwell, who once worked at SourceForge, blames the ad-supported business model as the underlying reason Sourceforge sucked[1]. The users were the product and the real customers were the advertisers no matter how much he and his coworkers wanted to believe otherwise. He credits GitHub's straight up reliance on just user revenue as the key to the quality of their product.

We've all been duped into thinking that ads give us things for free. Sourceforge and all other ad-supported sites are not only not free, they are costing us more than if we just paid[2]. We users neec to hear Maciej Cegłowski[3] exhortation, "Don't Be a Free User"[4].

I can't wait for the day when more people realize that entire web is being held hostage by advertising and a web without ads would be to today's web what GitHub is to Sourceforge.

[1] http://daltoncaldwell.com/an-audacious-proposal

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8585237

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords

[4] https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

Is there a reason/ability to pay Github if all your work is open source (ie. no private repos)?

There's certainly no reason to, but the brilliance of the model is that you repay open source generosity in kind with a killer tool. Naturally open source developers also tend to have day jobs, and then which commercial option do you think they'll be pushing for in all those companies?

Of course it only works because the product is brilliant, and the product is only brilliant because it was created by open source developers scratching their own itch. I don't think the lessons really apply to the wider web.

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