[PD] Migrate away from Sourceforge?

[Simon Wise]

On 31/08/13 06:46, Thomas Mayer wrote:

> I cannot vouch, that any commercial service will not do the same of
> course. Github e.g. stopped supporting downloads of binaries a few
> months ago.

ISPs charge for bandwidth, in some places much more heavily than others, so for 
hosting lots of binaries without this kind of revenue raising you need to go 
through some big institution with serious bandwidth ... say a university, or the 
mirrors provided within various ISPs or academic networks, and accept their 
conditions to do so.

Otherwise you can choose to only supply binaries to those people willing (and 
able) to join peer to peer file sharing networks, or willing and able to get 
their binaries through the big mirror system organised by Debian or similar.

Essentially either abandon potential or existing users who only use commercial 
channels (maybe a few will actually learn, expand their horizons, and follow the 
move) or join their club, make use of their channels, and live with their 
techniques. It's a difficult choice, it depends on your goals.

Github is offering binary downloads again, but I'd guess that can only continue 
if the volume stays reasonably small (i.e. if most users are there for the code, 
as developers ... and they distribute their binaries using other channels) or 
the revenue they can extract from the user in the process gets higher, or they 
can pass the bandwidth cost on to the projects as a paid service.


Simon