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. A

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.