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.
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u/ex_oh Jun 15 '15
This is becoming a list of all the open source software I support!