SourceForge is changing its practices regarding adding
third-party offers to the installer of seemingly-unmaintained software projects, following complaints from users and recent reports. The company is no longer adding the extra offers, which includes antivirus software and back-up services which generate SourceForge revenue, and will instead only add the extra items to projects that have chosen to include them in the installer.
It was discovered last week that SourceForge would take control of some open source projects if they appeared to be abandoned, maintaining them while also adding its own custom installer that offers various other software and services to end users before providing the free software they wanted.
The issue was raised
to Ars Technica by Jernej Simoncic, the developer behind the Gimp for Windows builds, after he could not log into his account and discovered the installer-based advertising. It has since been discovered that the same employee-based account also performed similar duties to other prominent projects, including Firefox, Wordpress, and the majority of the Apache Foundation's projects.
In a
blog post, the SourceForge community team writes "we have stopped presenting third-party offers for unmaintained SourceForge Projects," citing "negative community feedback." Now, SourceForge will only add the third-party offers "where it is explicitly approved by the project developer, or if the project is already bundling third-party offers."
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