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"Slashdot and GIMP"
Jun. 1st, 2015 05:47 pmHere's a good example of why it's important to know which companies are owned by which companies.
For those who don't know, Slashdot over the years has become filled with summaries that are essentially clickbait. Essentially to get to the front page from the firehose submitters have pretty much noticed that if you spin it in a way that will piss people off to the point where they absolutely have to post their comments on it, it's more likely to get accepted.
Often times these submissions end up either ignoring important information that's right in the article they're linking that would make the entire thing a non-story and not worth posting (for example: "malware infecting Linux PCs by the thousands!" -> "In order to be affected by the malware, the linux administrator must run it on their server.")
These things often get fast tracked through the firehose as well. For instance there's an article about someone coding a version of pacman on a 32x32 display, or something. That cleared the firehose in less than 2 hours. As a retrogamer I can think of many many other things that would be more worth of getting on slashdot.
So the story linked to above is about Sourceforge taking over what they decide are abandoned projects, and adding adware to the installers for those projects - locking out the original maintainer from the project, as the GIMP-Win maintainer found out. You wouldn't know about that from the subject of the slashdot article would you. Sounds like something they would LOVE to use as clickbait material, and indeed there are a LOT of dups giving the same information that are a lot more informative and clickbait worthy that have been posted over the last week.
Until today, Slashdot has been the only tech news reporter site that has NOT covered the story. And it seems the only reason they posted it now is because people are screaming that slashdot is burying it. Meaning they would have continued trying to "find the most informative/correct" information on the story before posting it otherwise after their "busy weekend" that they just got back from - even though things have been posting on slashdot regularly all weekend, and the story was all over the other sites since last Wednesday.
Slashdot is owned by Dice.
Sourceforge is owned by Dice.
The article above only has about 200-300 comments made to it so far - you'd expect it to have lots more if people cared yes? It's been over 1 hour since I last posted a comment on there (only one, as AC since with the state slashdot is in, I really can't see myself bothering to sign up for it.) and I still can't post another comment. This is the LONGEST time it's ever made me wait to post a second time.
Here are some other stories on it that showed up LAST WEEK.
Ars technica
The Register
Linuxveda
reddit
Jesus, there are sites coming up in google that covered this story last week that I haven't even HEARD of before.
Here's Sourceforge's BS explanation. As many people would say, a mirror of the project would indicate that the files are the same - which is not the case here. The new files have adware added. And how could they keep a project "Current" by seizing the account from the original maintainer?
Here's the kicker. "Since our change to mirror GIMP-Win, we have received no requests by the original author to resume use of this project. We welcome further discussion about how SourceForge can best serve the GIMP-Win author." ... how about giving back control over his project. I don't see what discussion is needed.
Main reason I went looking for extra links to the story was to give slashdot some time to let me make a second comment. They apparently have it set to make damned sure people aren't going to make a second comment unless they sit around a looong time. (or log in, etc. Not a heck of a lot of repeat commenters in there though even signed in.)
For those who don't know, Slashdot over the years has become filled with summaries that are essentially clickbait. Essentially to get to the front page from the firehose submitters have pretty much noticed that if you spin it in a way that will piss people off to the point where they absolutely have to post their comments on it, it's more likely to get accepted.
Often times these submissions end up either ignoring important information that's right in the article they're linking that would make the entire thing a non-story and not worth posting (for example: "malware infecting Linux PCs by the thousands!" -> "In order to be affected by the malware, the linux administrator must run it on their server.")
These things often get fast tracked through the firehose as well. For instance there's an article about someone coding a version of pacman on a 32x32 display, or something. That cleared the firehose in less than 2 hours. As a retrogamer I can think of many many other things that would be more worth of getting on slashdot.
So the story linked to above is about Sourceforge taking over what they decide are abandoned projects, and adding adware to the installers for those projects - locking out the original maintainer from the project, as the GIMP-Win maintainer found out. You wouldn't know about that from the subject of the slashdot article would you. Sounds like something they would LOVE to use as clickbait material, and indeed there are a LOT of dups giving the same information that are a lot more informative and clickbait worthy that have been posted over the last week.
Until today, Slashdot has been the only tech news reporter site that has NOT covered the story. And it seems the only reason they posted it now is because people are screaming that slashdot is burying it. Meaning they would have continued trying to "find the most informative/correct" information on the story before posting it otherwise after their "busy weekend" that they just got back from - even though things have been posting on slashdot regularly all weekend, and the story was all over the other sites since last Wednesday.
Slashdot is owned by Dice.
Sourceforge is owned by Dice.
The article above only has about 200-300 comments made to it so far - you'd expect it to have lots more if people cared yes? It's been over 1 hour since I last posted a comment on there (only one, as AC since with the state slashdot is in, I really can't see myself bothering to sign up for it.) and I still can't post another comment. This is the LONGEST time it's ever made me wait to post a second time.
Here are some other stories on it that showed up LAST WEEK.
Ars technica
The Register
Linuxveda
Jesus, there are sites coming up in google that covered this story last week that I haven't even HEARD of before.
Here's Sourceforge's BS explanation. As many people would say, a mirror of the project would indicate that the files are the same - which is not the case here. The new files have adware added. And how could they keep a project "Current" by seizing the account from the original maintainer?
Here's the kicker. "Since our change to mirror GIMP-Win, we have received no requests by the original author to resume use of this project. We welcome further discussion about how SourceForge can best serve the GIMP-Win author." ... how about giving back control over his project. I don't see what discussion is needed.
Main reason I went looking for extra links to the story was to give slashdot some time to let me make a second comment. They apparently have it set to make damned sure people aren't going to make a second comment unless they sit around a looong time. (or log in, etc. Not a heck of a lot of repeat commenters in there though even signed in.)
