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

by mkautzm 13y ago

0X1A 13y ago
I have a feeling SourceForge won't have much life left in the coming years
JohnTHaller 13y ago
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).
- mkautzm 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
- idamateur 13y ago
  Are binaries usually downloaded directly from SourceForge? I always end up using a mirror provided by a sponsor

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

by mkautzm 13y ago

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

0X1A 13y ago

I have a feeling SourceForge won't have much life left in the coming years

JohnTHaller 13y ago

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).

mkautzm 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
idamateur 13y ago
Are binaries usually downloaded directly from SourceForge? I always end up using a mirror provided by a sponsor