What Happened to SourceForge?
The situation worsened again, we received literally dozens of emails each week from angry users complaining about some bundled software and toolbars that were added to the installer. Sourceforge did not (yet) modify our installer in any way, instead our users were clicking on some of these misleading ads. I remember counting more than seven “download” button on our SF.net page!
We couldn’t continue to operate this way so in April 2013 I started working on a new way to distribute VLC. We rented few servers, contacted some mirrors and everything was ready a couple of weeks later. We were finally able to pull the plug from the Sourceforge website.
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Fast forward, end of May 2015 we heard about the Gimp binaries being bundled with the SourceForge installer and their admin access taken over by some sf-editor1. We were quite surprised to discover that the same happened to VLC, the project has been taken over without notice, removing all access to it but luckily the binaries weren’t touched. Maybe because we’re now signing all of them for the Windows platform. And we’re now trying to get our access restored to avoid any further damage.
Update (2024-04-01): Greg Foster (via Hacker News):
It’s easy to take GitHub ubiquity for granted - but how did things get this way?
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