Softpedia published some of my open source projects — how to react?
- by polarblau
(FYI: I've just moved this question over from Stackoverflow on recommendation.)
I just received a few emails, informing me that softpedia.com has added some of my "products" to their "database of scripts, code snippets and web applications". My products are in this case some smaller open source projects, which I have hosted and published on github.
Now I'm wondering how to react to this. This site is indirectly making money of my free work through ads on three pages before the actual download. They also seem to "invent" version numbers and I can't find out if they're hosting the latest or all versions of my projects. — I can see how this could lead to problems in the future, since I don't control what's "the latest" everywhere.
On the other hand I don't mind some extra publicity. I want as many people as possible to know about the projects, use them, fork them and hopefully improve them.
The projects in questions are really fairly small, but this might not be the case in the future for me and/or other people reading this question.
I'm sure that this must have happened to others around here. What's your opinion? Should I try to get the downloads removed?
Update 1
I've requested the removal and mentioned that I don't feel that Softpedia can provide the right environment for this kind of project.
Their team got back to me instantly with a friendly email saying, that they'll remove the links for now:
If you are worried that your projects won't be updated, then I must
tell you that I have them bookmarked in my RSS reader, so any version
changes will be forwarded to me when needed. So I promise I'll keep
your script up to date as soon as I see an update in the repository.
I have to say, that I appreciate this kind of reaction quite a lot and so I sent them another email, describing in more detail what I'm worried about and what bothers me. I also stated, that I'm aware that my license clearly permits them to host the projects in any case, but that I'd be even happy if they would host the projects as long as they could convince me of a few details and maybe make some small changes to the way the projects are represented. — Let's see where this goes.
Update 2
After discussing with their contact and requesting some changes regarding display of version (they had given the possibility to do so) and authorship they put the projects back up on their site.
All in all a positive and definitely interesting experience.
