SF Says AdWare Bundled with Gimp Is Intentional

tresf writes: In response to a Google+ post from the Gimp project claiming that "[Sourceforge] is now distributing an ads-enabled installer of GIMP", Sourceforge had this response:

In cases where a project is no longer actively being maintained, SourceForge has in some cases established a mirror of releases that are hosted elsewhere. This was done for GIMP-Win.

Editor's note: Gimp is actively being maintained and the definition of "mirror" is quite misleading here as a modified binary is no longer a verbatim copy. Download statistics for Gimp on Windows show SourceForge as offering over 1,000 downloads per day of the Gimp software. In an official response to this incident, the official Gimp project team reminds users to use official download methods. Slashdotters may remember the last time news like this surfaced (2013) when the Gimp team decided to move downloads from SourceForge to their own FTP service.

Therefore, we remind you again that GIMP only provides builds for Windows via its official Downloads page.

Note: SourceForge and Slashdot share a corporate parent.

It's been going on for a while.

[wschalle]

They've been doing this for a long time now, since 2013 I think. It's a shady tactic, but AFAIK it's legal. They've "mirrored" a lot of other projects as well, including every Apache project, Audacity, Eclipse, Firefox, and many others. You can see the whole list here: http://sourceforge.net/u/sf-ed... [sourceforge.net]

gimp

[JohnVanVliet]

The Gimp builds very easily in MinGW on windows
i use it as a test to check if MinGW's gcc is set up corectly

just build the source -- it is EASY
( unless you try to use MS's visual studio - then it is WORSE than root-canal without anesthetic )

How much you want to bet the GPL is being violated

[Khyber]

So long as the installer, the adware/malware and all other distributed software are all open sourced, there's no GPL violation.

I don't see any open source code for the installer, the adware, or malware.

Hey, Slashdot Media, guess what?

Caught in their lies

[Khyber]

To quote another user from Ars:

"the files page has the folder GIMP + GTK+ (stable release) with a last modified time of 2014-11-18. In that, GIMP 2.8.14 is the latest with the 2014-11-18 modification date. The previous file, GIMP 2.8.10 has a modification date of 2014-05-29. (This is just shy of 6 months.) The one before that, GIMP 2.8.8 is also last modified 2014-05-29, and the one before that is GIMP 2.8.6 last modified on 2013-06-24. (This one is just shy of 11 months back.)

So the project was abandoned,

It's called Source Forge

[Bing Tsher E]

I have noticed for years that the name of the service is Source Forge. Why wouldn't they be involved in forgery of source code and insertion of malware features and all such kinds of things? Once you start engaging in forgery the sky is the limit, after all.