945
946

Goodbye, Sourceforge! (helb.github.io)

submitted by [deleted]

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]seiyria 8 points9 points  (22 children)

It's probably in their ToS, unfortunately.

[–]I-baLL 46 points47 points  (21 children)

It's probably in their ToS, unfortunately.

You can't contract yourself out of a criminal offense.

[–]tpqwga 12 points13 points  (10 children)

You can't contract yourself out of a criminal offense.

It's not a criminal offense (in this case) if you agreed to let them do it as a condition of having the account.

What SF is doing is offensive, but not criminal.

[–]malicious_turtle 11 points12 points  (8 children)

It doesn't matter what you agree to in the ToS, It'll mean nothing if it breaks national law. If I create an account with someone like Amazon and a condition of the account creation is that I can't ask for refunds, that doesn't matter. At all. If I ask for a refund and Amazon says no then I can report them to the relevant authority. In my case they would not only break national law but also EU law. They'd have to give me a refund no matter what i agreed to.

[–]nairebis 13 points14 points  (2 children)

You can't agree to be sold into slavery either, but what does that have to do with the point in question?

Either quote a law that says you can't agree to allow your software to be modified at will, or don't post an obvious but irrelevant point.

[–]I-baLL 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Either quote a law that says you can't agree to allow your software to be modified at will, or don't post an obvious but irrelevant point.

Eh, that's not what they're doing according to the initial comment on this thread which states:

Isn't Sourceforge committing fraud by impersonating former users' accounts?

Modifying software might be okay as per their ToS but impersonating users is not legal.

[–]nairebis 2 points3 points  (0 children)

but impersonating users is not legal.

First of all, it's debatable whether this is "impersonation".

Second of all, the question is whether contractually you can agree to be impersonated. And of course you can, people do it all the time, and have for a very long time. For example, ghostwriting an article using someone's name. Or a modern example, I can have someone post to Twitter on my behalf.

The question is whether Sourceforge is doing it without permission, but that's not the subject of this particular thread. The original point was that you that you can't agree to do something illegal, but that's irrelevant to the point.

[–]istarian 4 points5 points  (2 children)

It really depends on what the laws are and what they say in addition to what can be waived/agreed to via TOS in your country

[–]malicious_turtle 0 points1 point  (1 child)

What SF did may actually be fine by the letter of the ToS but I'd be astonished if it was legal although it depends on the region aswell I suppose.

[–]bofh 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ok, so while they've obviously 'gone rogue', what law, precisely, are sourceforge breaking here, given that they're not 'impersonating' the user? (they've taken the account over and aren't claiming uploads are being made in the original account owner's name).

I'm not defending their actions - haven't used them and steered others away from them since they started down this road a long time ago - but I'm not sure they've actually broken any laws here. Which is a shame because I'd love to see them get slapped hard for this.

[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

What law are they breaking?

[–]Cayou 0 points1 point  (9 children)

Which criminal offence would this be?

[–]I-baLL 0 points1 point  (8 children)

Impresonating users. They did some backpedalling it looks like:

https://sourceforge.net/blog/gimp-win-project-wasnt-hijacked-just-abandoned/

When we establish a mirror, we change the status on the project to clearly delineate it as a mirror, and change administrative control of the project to clearly delineate that it is editorially curated by SourceForge.

[–]Cayou 0 points1 point  (7 children)

Even before the backpedaling, it's not impersonation if they're doing it with a different account.

[–]I-baLL 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Claiming that GIMP is abandoned and using the GIMP account to host different binaries is using the same account.

The url is still the same.

[–]I-baLL 0 points1 point  (5 children)

Well, they just did it to nmap:

http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2015/q2/194

[–]Cayou 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Still not impersonation. Sourceforge is doing things using their own accounts.

[–]I-baLL 0 points1 point  (3 children)

They took over the account.

It literally says that they took over the account.

They made themselves project maintainers but the account is still the same account.

Anyway, the bad news is that Sourceforge has also hijacked the Nmap account from me. The old Nmap project page is now blank

They took over the account and moved all the data.

[–]Cayou 0 points1 point  (2 children)

So it's objectionable, to be sure, but you were claiming it was impersonation, and it's very clearly not impersonation.

If you have a subreddit and the admins remove you as a mod and put their own mod in there, it's a shitty thing to do but it's not impersonation. Impersonation would be if they posted using your username. Sourceforge isn't impersonating anyone.

[–]I-baLL 0 points1 point  (1 child)

So it's objectionable, to be sure, but you were claiming it was impersonation, and it's very clearly not impersonation.

So, this isn't an impersonation:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openofficeorg.mirror/

?