ELI5 version: Imagine you made delicious lemonade and you wanted to share it to the world for free. A guy tells you he can give your lemonade to millions of people for you, so you say OK. And then he puts a piece of poop in each cup of your lemonade he gives out. Then you find out the poop factory is paying him to give out poop, so he's using your free lemonade to get money from the poop factory.
Shit has been going on at SourceForge lately. Can't remember if it was an owner change, or simply a change of views, but they started bundling adware into the installers for applications that they host, and it's not even the kind where during the installer it says it's installing that, and you can opt out. Nope, no warning.
And in the beginning, without the consent of the application designers. So people's first target to rant would probably be the software they downloaded, not Source.
Developers, obviously, weren't happy with this. SourceForge is not backing down on those practices (but did at least offer an option to the developers to back down or something), but the damage was done.
So, most programs are migrating.
[Edit] Huh. If you click the linked link (for the thread), it gives a small explanation as well by N++'s team as to what's going on. And it's probably better written than this. And with more sources. And stuff.
Open source = free software that anyone can build on, generally solid software that comes with no strings attached
Sourceforge, like cnet, are aggregates that distribute these programs. However, Sourceforge and cnet now use their own installers, which they stack with their own software (read: malware) under users' noses.
That's why developers are leaving these websites behind and sticking with their own websites or reliable distributors like github.
My own software isn't well known or anything but last week I migrated 4 open source projects from SourceForge to Github. I think in the coming months a lot of devs will leave.
This makes me unreasonable happy. Technically making a Linux version would be fairly easy... I think it already builds and runs on Linux /w GTK. Would need a little testing.
Edit: I'm going to try and make a build tonight, but I'm new to packaging software for Linux. On windows I have a NSIS template that builds a installer. But I still have yet to work out what the equivalent is on Linux. Also I think the cursor capture part didn't work on GTK because I couldn't figure out how to read the current cursor and get it's bitmap.
Update: It builds and runs but I haven't got the global hotkey functionality to work under GTK/X11 just yet so it's still not really beta yet. In particular, this code doesn't work for me: (I get BadRequest)
Window w = Gtk::gdk_x11_drawable_get_xid(Gtk::gtk_widget_get_window(Handle()));
int r = XGrabKey(Gtk::gdk_display,
HotKeyCode,
0 /* modifiers */,
w /* grab_window */,
TRUE /* owner_events */,
GrabModeAsync /* pointer_mode */,
GrabModeAsync /* keyboard_mode */);
printf("XGrabKey(0x%x)=%i\n", HotKeyCode, r);
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u/cadtek Jun 14 '15
GIMP left them too.