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The article gets a few things very wrong. First off, there are no drive-by installers. It's an offer-based installer. Meaning that when you run it, you get a

The article gets a few things very wrong. First off, there are no drive-by installers. It's an offer-based installer. Meaning that when you run it, you get a single offer of an additional product. Second, it's offering you either trialware (a trial version of a for-sale product that they hope you buy after trying) or adware (like an Ask.com toolbar to ad to your browser). The author of this blog post is either outright lying about it doing drive-by-installers and malware or is clueless about what the terminology actually means. The last time this was posted on HN, I did a quick writeup on my understanding of it (reposted here): "For the curious, this is an optional program at SourceForge being offered to developers as a way to monetize their work. The developer needs to specifically request it. SourceForge gets a cut, so does the developer. The installer is their first stab at this process and is using the bundling technology from Ask.com. As offer-based installers go, this one is about as good as it gets. It makes a single offer and has an Accept and Decline button with the user selecting whichever one they want (not a pre-checked box accepting the offer above a Next/Continue button). If accepted, the installer installs the offered software and it gets a standard entry in Windows' Add/Remove Programs that works as expected. If declined, the installer continues. The installer then downloads the originally-requested software. The two issues with the current installer are that (1) it is served in place of the requested file with no indication that a substitution is made as the user downloads and (2) it requests admin rights before it starts downloading the software, which can be a security issue. Roberto (who posted the article) has stated that they are working on #1 in terms of the text shown on SourceForge as you select to download and download. As for #2, there may be some ways to rework the installer so this is not an issue. I'll mention it to him when I speak to him. SourceForge has one other revenue-share program with developers where you place the SourceForge-branded download buttons on your own website that link to your downloads on SourceForge and you get a small cut of the ad revenue made from the download page. If I recall correctly, SourceForge has been losing money for a few years now. Dice Holdings picked up SourceForge and Slashdot while Geek.com kept ThinkGeek.com, so they are now separate entities. These new experiments are attempts to get SourceForge to be self-sustaining/profitable. Ad revenue alone likely won't cut it. Unfortunately, Google Code, Github and others don't offer the full breadth of services that SourceForge does for open source projects. Google Code, Github, and others have all ditched binary downloads, so SourceForge is one of the only providers to make binary downloads available to Windows and Mac user at no charge. This is why SourceForge is popular for real apps (FileZilla, Pidgin, PortableApps.com, etc) and Github is popular for components (node.js, jquery, rails, etc). The code zips available at other providers are of no use to end users. As full disclosure, I run PortableApps.com, one of SourceForge's largest projects pushing quite a few TBs of downloads through their mirror network. We make use of the SF-branded download buttons revenue share program but do not make use of nor have any plans to use the "enhanced" installers. Everything I've discussed here is already publicly available, I just thought it would be handy to have in one place." After that post, it was pointed out to me that Github has added in the ability to host binaries, but I would wager they wouldn't take kindly to the kind of bandwidth that the major SF projects like PortableApps.com push through. I've also been in touch with Roberto who made the mentioned post on SourceForge about some suggestions and options including doing an open source installer that the end-user/sysadmin can verify before installing instead of it being a downloader installer with the offer built in but not the app you want.

dag11 13y ago
Actually GitHub does have a binary release system. You can upload binaries tagged to a commit and provide a markdown description for the download.
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  I was unaware of that with the original quoted post from a few weeks ago but it was pointed out when I posted so I included a mention in the last paragraph of my post here.
- jlarocco 13y ago
  Actually, they removed that feature in December. [1] GitHub is a developer tool. Users not interested in viewing/changing/building the source code should get the software from the project's website. [1] https://github.com/blog/1302 https://github.com/blog/1302
  - JohnTHaller 13y ago
    They added in "Releases" again last month after discontinuing file downloads in December: https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software The examples all only show Zips but you can apparently add in EXEs, MSIs, DMGs, etc. I'd wager that they won't put up with high numbers of downloads on free projects ala FileZilla, GIMP, PortableApps.com on SourceForge, though.
    - pbreit 13y ago
      "I'd wager that they won't put up with high numbers of downloads" Pure speculation. More speculation: I'd wager they'd be OK with it. Bandwidth is practically free.
      - JohnTHaller 13y ago
        Except that bandwidth is not actually free. Setting up on a high quality network of mirror servers around the world is usually ~$50 per TB (on something like MaxCDN that we use) but more like $100+ per TB on something like Akamai. That's buying commercial bandwidth on server networks. I mention that as SourceForge has a worldwide network of servers they get from all sorts of companies in exchange for advertising and that we can use for free. We could setup on something like an unmetered host. We'd lose the worldwide network and geographic closeness of the servers to the downloaders, of course. You can get a 1gbps dedicated unmetered connection for around $800+ a month (not including the actual server) at several providers. A 100mbps dedicated unmetered would not be sufficient for PortableApps.com as it would only total 20TB a month used fulltime (of the theoretical ~32GB max it could push if you discount overhead, etc).

dag11 13y ago

Actually GitHub does have a binary release system. You can upload binaries tagged to a commit and provide a markdown description for the download.

JohnTHaller 13y ago
I was unaware of that with the original quoted post from a few weeks ago but it was pointed out when I posted so I included a mention in the last paragraph of my post here.
jlarocco 13y ago
Actually, they removed that feature in December. [1] GitHub is a developer tool. Users not interested in viewing/changing/building the source code should get the software from the project's website. [1] https://github.com/blog/1302 https://github.com/blog/1302
- JohnTHaller 13y ago
  They added in "Releases" again last month after discontinuing file downloads in December: https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software The examples all only show Zips but you can apparently add in EXEs, MSIs, DMGs, etc. I'd wager that they won't put up with high numbers of downloads on free projects ala FileZilla, GIMP, PortableApps.com on SourceForge, though.
  - pbreit 13y ago
    "I'd wager that they won't put up with high numbers of downloads" Pure speculation. More speculation: I'd wager they'd be OK with it. Bandwidth is practically free.
    - JohnTHaller 13y ago
      Except that bandwidth is not actually free. Setting up on a high quality network of mirror servers around the world is usually ~$50 per TB (on something like MaxCDN that we use) but more like $100+ per TB on something like Akamai. That's buying commercial bandwidth on server networks. I mention that as SourceForge has a worldwide network of servers they get from all sorts of companies in exchange for advertising and that we can use for free. We could setup on something like an unmetered host. We'd lose the worldwide network and geographic closeness of the servers to the downloaders, of course. You can get a 1gbps dedicated unmetered connection for around $800+ a month (not including the actual server) at several providers. A 100mbps dedicated unmetered would not be sufficient for PortableApps.com as it would only total 20TB a month used fulltime (of the theoretical ~32GB max it could push if you discount overhead, etc).