Chris has written for The New York Times, been interviewed as a technology expert on TV stations like Miamis NBC 6, and had his work covered by news outlets like the BBC.Since then, a few sitesincluding SourceForge themselveshave started cleaning up their act.But now that a few are getting better, we wanted to give credit where credit is dueso consider this an ongoing list of sites that have made things right.
The new owners immediately began cleaning up SourceForge, terminating the controversial DevShare program that wrapped open-source installers in junkware, sometimes against the wishes of their developers. We want to restore our reputation as a trusted home for open source software, and this was a clear first step towards that. Were more interested in doing the right thing than making extra short-term profit, they wrote in their announcement. Safest Site To Software Software Download Site AnSafest Site To Software Download Site AnBack when we examined a variety of download sites, we called the Tucows software download site an abomination that should be removed from the Internet and found that it was probably worse than even Download.com. Tucows isnt just a software download sitethe company also makes money from selling domain names, cell phone service, and fiber Internet. But weve been growing like crazy the last couple of years (from wonderful customer-focused, subscription services) and we realized its no longer worth the money to be associated with that nonsense. We considered just shutting the download site off but decided it felt more right to keep it running (with just a fraction of peoples time here) as a sort of public service. Theres just a small bit of advertising for other Tucows services, like domain registration. You can now visit Download.com and youll get direct links to download programs without any additional junkware. Wed like to see them clean up their advertising and getting rid of ads with misleading green Download buttons that encourage visitors to click the wrong thing. But Download.com deserves credit for abandoning its much-hated installer. Safest Site To Software For Free And OpenIts a download hosting site for free and open-source software (or FOSS). For awhile, it was the best centralized place to get Windows freeware safely, and nothings changed there. Among the big general freeware download sites, Ninite was the only one that wont try to force junk onto your computerafter all, FossHub is just for open-source software. Ninite even lets you install software that normally includes its own, developer-added junkware and skips it for you. For example, you can use Ninite to install Java without it offering Javas usual installer junkware. Many software projects offer downloads on their own websites and these downloads can be clean, although many software projects make money by adding junkware to their own downloads. But GitHub is more about code hosting, and the download experience for users who arent developers isnt as user-friendly. Wed love to see more download sites follow SourceForge and Tucows, but theyll need business models that allow them to make money without potentially unwanted programs. Our goal is to keep this list up to date, so if and when more sites cut the crap(ware), well add them to this post. Hes written about technology for nearly a decade and was a PCWorld columnist for two years.
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