The whole blog post can be summarised in the one sentence "Mirrored projects are sometimes used to deliver easy-to-decline third-party offers."
Makes me pretty sad since I still remember the days when SourceForge was one of the good guys.
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> "Mirrored projects are sometimes used to deliver easy-to-decline third-party offers."
If they just mirrored the project, no one would be complaining. Having another place to download copies of the official releases is a good idea.
The issue is they changed the release. They advertised it as "mirror of Gimp-Win version X". And it wasn't. It was Gimp-Win version X with a boatload of adware / crapware. This made the Gimp-Win people upset that the crapware was being falsely associated with their product.
If SF had advertised it as "SF Version of Gimp-Win with magic crapware", people would be less upset. And fewer people would download it, of course. Which isn't what SF wants.
Their self-serving statement about "mirror" is a lie. The people who wrote it should be ashamed of themselves.
When would that have been, the year 2000? I remember as early as 2003 thinking they were junk because of the intrusive banner ads with no borders that only said "Download Now!" You actually had to look for the smallest download link, verify it was actual text, then hover over it to check to see if the URL ended in your expected file name.
They were never good guys: they start by an $10 billion IPO with the ticker "LNUX" to ride on linux success.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geeknet#Initial_public_offerin...
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/10/business/a-tiny-company-wi...
Seriously!
How this was done was wrong.
SF writes: "Mirrored projects are sometimes used to deliver easy-to-decline third-party offers, and the original downloads are always available."
It's wrong because it's disingenuous - an insincere representation of the GIMP maintainers package, to include adware in the package.
SF insufficiently differentiates this "gimp-win" project with the small, coded byline: "Brought to you by: sf-editor1" (http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp-win/files/)
Let's be blatant and honest: this is "SF-GIMP" not GIMP. It's being operated here under the guise of the authors and currently not sufficiently identified as a fork.
SF skirts "adoption responsibility" by simply writing a post to some unrelated blog article after the fact and create a collection of unrelated "deceptive ad blocking" website tools.
RECOMMENDATIONS TO SF:
* Be up front and bold about "adopting"!
* Free software or not this adoption stinks!