“It appears that SourceForge took control of the 'GIMP for Windows' account”

https://plus.google.com/+gimp/posts/cxhB1PScFpe

by patdavid • 11 years ago

166 81 11 years ago

plus.google.com

subudeepak5• 11 years ago

Any other projects affected ? Would be nice to start a list of all affected projects. This could also be a case of targeted attack on the gimp account.

phkahler• 11 years ago

Or you can just stop getting anything from sourceforge since their MO is now to distribute crapware.

subudeepak5• 11 years ago

Even apache openoffice is using SourceForge for their downloads. There are quite a lot of s/w there at this moment.

prokoudine2• 11 years ago

http://sourceforge.net/u/sf-editor1/profile/

Nice list. Got Audacity there, for instance.

subudeepak5• 11 years ago

These are all affected repos ! Damn !!!

psykovsky2• 11 years ago

Bitcoin is on there also. Now that is worrying.

SwellJoe4• 11 years ago

Several of those are projects that were never hosted at SourceForge, aren't they? Firefox, for example, I don't believe was ever an SF project. WordPress, I don't recall ever seeing on SourceForge. Are they altering the binaries they are posting on their "mirror"?

This is very confusing.

lvs• 11 years ago

Firefox, cgminer, zotero, etc.. Yikes.

patdavid• 11 years ago

The account that the GIMP-WIN project got "moved" to from it's official maintainer (jernej), is called "sf-editor1".

Having a look through that accounts project history is a little fishy (http://sourceforge.net/u/sf-editor1/profile/)....

subudeepak5• 11 years ago

Does not look like something they would have done intentionally. Explanations will come soon I guess.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 11 years ago

The safest thing to do would be to assume that all software there is similarly afflicted and to never use Sourceforge again.

People who host software there should move to a different platform.

baldfat• 11 years ago

The only issue is that Sourceforge made nice binaries available. Most people have no idea how to use git and/or build their own binaries.

Karunamon3• 11 years ago

Wow. Is this legally actionable? Yeah yeah, their server and so forth, but pretending to be somebody is generally seen as a Bad Thing© by the courts.

shiggerino4• 11 years ago

What's with the copyright symbol?

Karunamon3• 11 years ago

A copyright that's been registered by Sourceforge ;)

cillian64• 11 years ago

Is there anything suggesting it's SourceForge itself doing this and not just (an improbably widespread, admittedly) set of account breaches? It makes sense -- acquire accounts, enable ads, profit.

ksherlock2• 11 years ago

"The Open Source Mirror Directory is an extension to our existing software directory, where we'll be mirroring projects that are not hosted on SourceForge, and SourceForge projects that have been abandoned."

Why are we doing this? We want the SourceForge software directory to be as useful as possible. When you come here to search for a piece of software, we want you to be able to find it, and find the most up to date releases. And if that software isn't hosted on SourceForge, we still want you to be able to find it. Or if a SourceForge project has been abandoned, we want it moved to the mirror and maintained, so you can always find the newest releases. Millions of people use SourceForge every day to search for Open Source software, and we want to give them the best experience possible, even if the best answer to their search is a project hosted elsewhere, or an abandoned project newly maintained by the SourceForge team.

http://sourceforge.net/mirror/

SwellJoe4• 11 years ago

So...they're claiming to "maintain" projects, and that means turning them into adware?

That's so underhanded and nasty that it's difficult to believe. If true, it means SourceForge has effectively become the nemesis of every software developer who ever used their services. And, it means every software developer who cares about software freedom and privacy must move everything off of SourceForge.

We host Webmin on SF.net, still, and it is downloaded over 3 million times per year, making it one of the most popular packages in the system administration category for over a decade (last I checked a few years ago, it was second only to phpmyadmin). They've never done anything weird or underhanded with our stuff (but most of our packages are signed and setup in such a way that fiddling with them would be somewhat challenging). Given its popularity, I would assume it would be a likely target for this sort of thing. But, maybe it's only "abandoned" projects? (Whatever that means, since it sounds like the original author in this case did not consider their project abandoned.)

geofft4• 11 years ago

What are the reasons for people to use SourceForge today? Why hasn't everyone else (especially major projects like GIMP and Audacity) moved off?

Here are some possibilities I can think of, but I'm curious if they're correct:

- Mailing list hosting

- Non-git repository hosting, for projects that prefer CVS or SVN

- Shell account (though it doesn't seem very useful)

- Features GitHub has but few others do (binary hosting, website hosting, etc.) and the project wants to avoid GitHub

Are there others?

JohnTHaller5• 11 years ago

One reason is discoverability as they have a rather extensive searchable directory of open source software.

Another reason for quite a while was binary hosting, which github originally supported, then discontinued, but finally added again in July 2013. Additionally, the ability to use any open source license or combinations of licenses, as Google Code supported binary downloads during the time github didn't but only permitted one license per project and only from a subset of open source licenses (originally a small subset, later expanded). Google Code, of course, is sunsetting now. And github now supports multiple licenses as well as binary releases.

mzjs• 11 years ago

Github lets you use any license you want.

krisdol• 11 years ago

I will second the Discovery aspect as being something that I like about SF when I first used it in the early 2000s. The reason I liked it so much was because I was a kid looking for free games to play on my PC, who soon learned to equate opensource == free, who then started browsing SF's games category (played a lot of BZflag).

That said, with projects and people leaving SF, and their UI leaving a lot to be desired, there are so many more options I'd first use for project discovery.

geofft4• 11 years ago

Oh right, the other reason I forgot to mention is lack of volunteer time/enthusiasm to deal with a move. If you already bounced between Google Code and SourceForge two years ago, chances are you're probably not completely excited about jumping ship to GitHub right now.

(But yes, right now, if you're on Git, GitHub will give you binary downloads and all licenses.)

makomk6• 11 years ago

GIMP did move off Sourceforge back in November 2013[1]. Unfortunately, because there were a bunch of links pointing there it still ranks very highly in searches for GIMP. I'm not sure if there's even any way to delete a Sourceforge project.

[1] See the top story on http://www.gimp.org/

geofft4• 11 years ago

You could remove all the installers, replace them with a README.txt, and update the website and project description.

That said, looking at the top story, I guess they consciously chose not to do that and then things went sour.

e40• 11 years ago

Is it possible to delete a project on SF? I've looked and can't find any information on it (on SF... haven't googled yet).

davidgerard2• 11 years ago

Legacy, basically.

jbk• 11 years ago

Our VLC account has been taken too by sf-editor-1.

Fortunately, we've moved to our mirror infrastructure since quite some time, and it's faster and way better.

Btw, if any other open source project needs help to distribute their binaries (because of the size), please contact me.

PS-EDIT: signing the installer was a good idea, I guess :)

davidgerard2• 11 years ago

Is there anything you can do to stop them malwaring VLC?

etix• 11 years ago

This is precisely for these reasons we stopped distributing VLC via SF.net in 2013. I even wrote about it: https://blog.l0cal.com/2013/05/02/rethinking-vlc-mirrors-inf...

biot• 11 years ago

Have you checked your site on an iPad? It's alternating the font size between small and large several times a second, resulting in a strobe effect that never stops. Yikes!

walterbell• 11 years ago

Bizarre. Happens only in landscape mode.

cmdrfred• 11 years ago

I had those scammy sourceforge links, I guess I haven't been lucky enough to write a project that will scale that big but I'll host it myself until I simply can't afford it anymore. Vlc is great by the way.

j_s• 11 years ago

Reviewing the meager amount of Twitter chatter it appears SourceForge had cemented its irrelevance before this craziness.

scrollaway• 11 years ago

Reposting what I wrote on the Reddit thread:

I'm one of the lead devs of LXQt and an LXDE sysadmin. We use Sourceforge for our mailing lists and some LXDE legacy stuff.

I'm absolutely sick of them. It's not the first time this has happened. I've been pushing for us to move off SF for a while and this is a good occasion to push for it harder.

I've sent an email [1] detailing plans to move. I am urging everyone who still has projects on Sourceforge to do the same.

If you have similar migration problems to solve as the ones I've highlighted in the email, please contact me directly and we can share the workload. My email is available on my Github profile [2].

[1] http://sourceforge.net/p/lxde/mailman/message/34148903/ [2] https://github.com/jleclanche

kierank• 11 years ago

The number of people casually suggesting github for large binaries on HN is incredible and funny. They should try downloading something from github in Asia and they'll learn why local mirrors are useful.

SamWhited• 11 years ago

I'll still never understand why people don't move off of SourceForge; GitHub and Bitbucket (among others) are almost feature complete, and for the things that they're missing (mailing lists) there are plenty of free alternatives out there that are fairly easy to port.

JohnTHaller5• 11 years ago

SourceForge made a blog post about the GIMP project here: http://sourceforge.net/blog/gimp-win-project-wasnt-hijacked-...

It appears they switched the GIMP project on SF back to directly downloading the standard GIMP installer, at least that's what I see right now in Firefox at 3:30pm NYC time.

yoz• 11 years ago

"Mirrored projects are sometimes used to deliver easy-to-decline third-party offers, and the original downloads are always available."

In other words: "Yes, we take your project and wrap it in an adware installer."

Someone12342• 11 years ago

Or as I call it: "the download.com strategy." Honestly SF are scumbags.

tdsamardzhiev• 11 years ago

Well, if it's abandoned, just leave it be. Yobs!

ajohnclark• 11 years ago

I think this pretty much explains why this happened, a quote from their parent company here: "2005 - IN AUGUST, WE ARE ACQUIRED BY DICE HOLDINGS, INC., WHICH IS OWNED EQUALLY BY GENERAL ATLANTIC LLC AND QUADRANGLE LLC, PRIVATE EQUITY FIRMS IN NEW YORK CITY." via: http://www.dhigroupinc.com/our-company/default.aspx

daveloyall• 11 years ago

As noted in other comments, the GIMP installer on http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp-win/files/ is now bit-for-bit identical to the one on http://download.gimp.org/pub/gimp/v2.8/windows/ (let's call this one official).

Does anybody have a copy of the "value added" installer?

How did it work? Was it a wrapper which contained a copy of the official installer? Did it have the same filename? Was there some identifier in the URL? A cookie?

In other words, can we programmatically identify other hijacked projects?

makomk6• 11 years ago

It was a small wrapper that downloads the actual installer, loaded from a different site to their usual mirrors because they outsourced the whole "bundling unwanted software" functionality to a third party. I don't still have a copy because I downloaded it in a temporary test VM, sorry.

JohnTHaller5• 11 years ago

It's a 730KB downloader installer as used by FileZilla, Angry IP Scanner, and other apps on SF that participate in the Dev Share program. You run it, it shows offers, then downloads the actual GIMP installer and runs that. I did a Virus Total scan of it earlier and the results are here: https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/a63a337b0aa6b2686440802eb...

It seems they've disabled the ability for the GIMP downloader installer posted earlier today to be able to download GIMP now. Possibly so other sites don't distribute it further thinking it's the real GIMP installer?

yuhong• 11 years ago

I wonder what would happen if Google or Yahoo! acquired them.

dm2• 11 years ago

Is that enough to qualify SourceForge as malicious and ask that it be removed from Google's search results?

hobarrera• 11 years ago

In this age of GitHub being huge, and GitLab being the purely open-source choice, this can't really end well for SF.

They really really need to up their game if they want to stay relevant. Most of the stuff I find pointing me to SF these days is usually abandoned (GIMP and Pidgin are probably notable exception).

unhammer• 11 years ago

More details: http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/anatomy-of-sourcefo...

naveen99• 11 years ago

Pywin32 also should find a new home or maybe a reimplementation in golang.

“It appears that SourceForge took control of the 'GIMP for Windows' account”

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