Open Letter to SourceForge

SourceForge staff,While I had not noticed this at first, it has come to my
awareness that VA is now appending advertising to SourceForge
project mailing lists. Advertising is certainly nothing new at
SourceForge, as there are annoying banner ads, and consequentially
for this reason, and because SourceForge is no longer being
developed as free software, I have largely withdrawn from using it,
except principally to continue hosting pre-existing mailing lists
using your "mailman" list server.However, I find this new use of mailing lists for stealth
advertising both unethical and offensive, because they appear as if
they were signature lines placed by the original poster. It is
neither clear that the advertised products or services are not
being endorsed and promoted by the message poster himself, nor is
that any better than spamming unsuspecting users with unwanted junk
e-mail, which is an equally disgusting practice. It is also
perturbing to consider that such lists may be used to advertise
proprietary software or potentially other products or services of
similarly questionable ethical character.Certainly I am free as a developer to terminate the use of
any remaining services hosted by VA, and under these present
intolerable circumstances, I see no choice but to do this. If there
is no satisfactory response to this present situation, I am
prepared to immediately close these remaining lists and request
[that] any current projects I still have shown on SourceForge be
de-listed. Fortunately, we do have several lists already available
on gnu.org, and it would not take that long to merge the existing
SourceForge list memberships into those with fairly minimal
disruption. We also have an excellent system in place for free
software development using Savannah.My hope is that VA would reconsider some of it's recent
policies and practices. I believe everyone would like to see
SourceForge continue to be available and used as a developer
community resource. I also fully appreciate the need VA has for
finding some revenue model to continue providing SourceForge as a
resource. However, I do not believe these specific practices will
make this possible.David SugarGNU MaintainerHello David,I just saw your email(s). I've been on vacation during the
past week and the pile of unread emails was sky high when I
returned.About ~45 days ago we started to put 2 line text messages at
the bottom of SourceForge.net mailing lists.As you probably know, running a site with over 3 million page
views a day, 300,000 downloaded files a day, 700,000 emails a day,
80 servers, and a staff of people is very expensive.We are using the email text messages, like many other sites,
as a small way to offset some of the costs of running
SourceForge.net for the Open Source Community.Since the inception of these text messages, we have received
very few complaints. I think the number is less than 10, which is
pretty good considering we send out over 700,000 emails a
day.I think the reason why the complaints are so low is:A) We told people about it before we did it. It was listed on
the site prior to us going live.B) Every email has the same ad. We change it approx once a
week. Anyone getting more then one email can see that the ads are
consistent and hence not part of the sig of the user.C) The ads are not archived with the email when they are
stored on the site for others to see on SF.NET. We strip out the
ads to cut down on confusion.D) Two lines of text is very consistent with what other sites
are doing. At the bottom of the email it doesn't get in the way of
the actual message.Of the 10 people who have written us so far, you are the
first to bring up the "stealth advertising" discussion. I
understand what you are saying, but I haven't seen evidence from
the feedback we've been getting that users are confused [by] what
is an ad and what is a sig. Certainly there is no stealth intent
from either us or our advertisers.One thing we could possibly do is change the top delimiter
from dashes to something like "Sponsored by:". It might help. I'll
discuss it with the staff.Thank you for the feedback. If you have any other
questions/concerns please feel free to email me.--PatEditors' Note: David Sugar is the leader of the
Bayonne Project, and Patrick
McGovern is the site director for
SourceForge.net.
For more information about Savannah, visit
the Savannah project web
site and read the March 2002
UpFront column in LJ.

email: sugar@gnu.org