Summary: Dubious strategic direction at SourceForge and Slashdot, which are becoming more like Windows malware and Microsoft PR sites, respectively

LINKEDIN, a crowdsourced spying and surveillance network, tells me that Slashdot staff has been looking for information about me. Apparently they are curious to know who exposes their scams, including the propaganda they are beaming to longtime readers of the site. According to one of our contributors, Dice.com claims to have made a lot more money from Slashdot, but it doesn't explain how. Does it get paid for PR? Is it selling users' data? Nobody knows. But based on the following disturbing story, Dice.com treats visitors like merchandise.

To quote IDG, which quotes the GIMP project, the increasingly-Microsoft-friendly SourceForge is up to no good:

In the past few months, we have received some complaints about the site where the GIMP installers for the Microsoft Windows platforms are hosted.

SourceForge, once a useful and trustworthy place to develop and host FLOSS applications, has faced a problem with the ads they allow on their sites - the green "Download here" buttons that appear on many, many adds leading to all kinds of unwanted utilities have been spotted there as well.

The tipping point was the introduction of their own SourceForge Installer software, which bundles third-party offers with Free Software packages. We do not want to support this kind of behavior, and have thus decided to abandon SourceForge.

So there you have it.

As lirodon put it in IRC, have "you heard about how the evil Dice.com is violating the trust of SourceForge users?"

He called the above "stupid "wrapped" installers with borderline malware," then cited "their support of those stupid "guess the download button" ads."

To clarify the obvious, Techrights never sold any data about visitors. It doesn't even keep such data. The data gets deleted periodically, unlike troll comments (there will always be zero censorship). The same policy will apply at Tux Machines, which we officially take under our wing today. Susan takes time to prepare for her wedding while I take over as main site maintainer. The first and only change to the site is removal of the Slashdot feed (DistroWatch Latest Releases feed replaces it).

Remember that Dice.com is just a business. It is trying to 'monetise' the sites above, it doesn't really care about truth, freedom, sharing, etc. ⬆