

Advertising, Bundling, Community and Criticism - WestCoastJustin
http://sourceforge.net/blog/advertising-bundling-community-and-criticism/#comments

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jmathai
I think it's important to cut SourceForge some slack. They've provided a
really valuable service for a long time. Monetizing on the Internet isn't easy
and we shouldn't pretend like it is. It's less easy if you've been around as a
free service for a decade. Not to mention having a newly created formidable
opponent.

I hope they find a better path to monetization. But this idea that they don't
care about users and are doing this "only for the money" is a bit much.

I know from first hand experience that when it comes to monetizing a service
that you have to be realistic about your options. Sometimes your best option
is somewhere between the ideal scenario and shutting a service down.

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tobyjsullivan
It's one thing to attempt to monetize a platform, it's another completely to
sell out your users and blur the lines of what's ethical.

Their methods are neither new nor innovative. They have simply been used
historically by less-than-honest organizations.

When SourceForge started monetizing by confusing their users, they opened
themselves up to criticism.

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JohnTHaller
This was a pilot program with exactly 3 out of 1/3 of a million projects. Opt
in. Not a whole-hog switch of anything like, say, Download.com.

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tobyjsullivan
Nope. I do not accept this explanation.

They're not the first to look at their product through the eyes of a
hacker/technically knowledgable customer. But too many people aren't savvy
enough to see past the confusion.

That's the only reason "secondary offerings" ever get installed. It's
dishonest and makes the Internet less accessible overall by adding a risk
which discourages participation by those who are still learning.

Furthermore, we all know they know what they're doing and their response is to
treat those who complained like dolts by "explaining" their facade. Bad! Bad
SourceForge!

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SFnetTeam
SourceForge is much like any other OSS project; we want to continue to serve
the OSS community which we have been doing for over a decade.

We are working on Apache Allura Incubating, which runs the SourceForge site,
and funding will help us continue to contribute there.

This program is a pilot program. Community feedback like this has helped us
continue to make adjustments in this program and our site, as well as to
provide a process that helps OSS projects fund development.

Best regards,

Daniel Hinojosa - SourceForge Community Manager

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mkautzm
My favorite part is how they are trying to rationalize their semi-recent
decisions to monetize their platform, while meanwhile on planet Github...

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JohnTHaller
Github has $100 million in relatively fresh capital to play with and a
profitable enterprise product to draw from to pay for the free users.
SourceForge doesn't have a freemium model to draw from. And SourceForge pushes
way more bandwidth than Github does thanks to all those hosted binary
downloads (Github only added this as a service this year).

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mkautzm
This is fair, but paying for their expenses this way is not the way to do it.
It's going to kill them in the end, and at best, is going to produce at best,
some short term profit while it's community bleeds away. I seriously think if
they jusut said, 'Hey, we have bills to pay. Would you be willing to donate?',
they might have seen some success. But that is now not a solution, since they
basically burned all their goodwill in one fell swoop with this model.

~~~
JohnTHaller
From reading the two (slightly) sensationalist stories on Hacker News, you
might think so. The thing is, SF has a larger community built up over many
years. And the DevShare program was piloted by literally 3 projects to see how
it would work, what the income would be, and what the reaction would be.

You or I could have told them the reaction among the tech savvy, of course. I
did after the fact via a detailed set of reasons why it was the wrong approach
and how it could be made much better if they were going to go down the offer-
based path.

As for the ads that were the other reason GIMP left, these fake download
button ads are everywhere. All over Google AdSense and every other graphical
ad network. And banning the specific bad ones is like whack-a-mole. That's one
of the reasons PortableApps.com only has text-based ads. I'm glad SF set up an
email address to report the bad ones, but it's going to be difficult for them
to weed them out.

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smacktoward
_> End-users are provided with a clear and transparent installer behavior_

Is the opt-in box pre-checked? If it is, then this justification is 100% Grade
A Angus bullshit.

We have decades and decades of experience now showing that people don't read
dialogs. They just click "Next" until they're through them. If you present a
user with an "offer" whose opt-in is pre-checked, _you are taking advantage of
this behavior,_ full stop. You know that if someone they trusted was sitting
next to them explaining what was about to happen if they checked that box,
they would not check it. So you try to sneak it past them by opting them in by
default and trusting that they won't notice.

And it works! You can fool a lot of people this way, if you want to. But just
because something is effective doesn't mean that it's "clear" or
"transparent." And deep down, if you're honest with yourself, you know that.

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hengheng
Their whole existence is based on being free, so they don't have a lot of room
to breathe. Reminds me of the old mantra of "If you're not paying, you're not
the customer".

Maybe the open source world should take more donations to solve the hosting
problem. I'd send money to the EFF to replace bad file hosters in a heartbeat.

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lenzm
"Ad Network partners like Google" but not Google because they don't allow that
on their network. If they were sincere, they could switch to more reputable ad
networks.

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JohnTHaller
Fake download button ads and the like are on Google AdSense all the time. It's
one of the reasons PortableApps.com uses AdSense for text ads only.

