After drawing the ire of the open-source community over the past couple of weeks, SourceForge published a blog post today explaining how it will generate ad revenue going forward.
The online software repository landed itself in hot water after it was found to be bundling adware with free and open-source software downloads, most notably the Windows version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP).
In the blog post, SourceForge said that the adware bundling was part of a test to see how palatable the ads would be. "SourceForge also recently ran a test of presenting easy-to-decline third-party offers with a small number (5) of projects mirrored on our site," the blog post said. "This included gimp-win, but did not include nmap. Based on the community feedback, we promptly discontinued this test based on community reaction."
In a blog post from May 31, the GIMP project chastised SourceForge for what it had done, and indicated that the trust the community had placed in the website had been irreparably damaged:
"To us, this firmly places SourceForge among the dodgy crowd of download sites. SourceForge are abusing the trust that we and our users had put into their service in the past. We don't believe that this is a fixable situation," the post said. "Even if they promise to adhere to the set of guidelines outlined below, these promises are likely to become worthless with any upcoming management change at SourceForge."
"As a company, we at SourceForge pride ourselves on being highly responsive to our community members," SourceForge's post said. "With that in mind and in an effort to facilitate feedback and ensure our responsiveness to the community, we have established a forum in which we encourage you to share your ideas and suggestions."
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1T7WKhG
