Today in Open Source: Have some folks been unfair to SourceForge? Plus: MATE added to Debian repositories, and a screenshot tour of Angel Linux Judging SourceForge SourceForge has gotten lots of criticism lately, but FOSS Force thinks that SourceForge may have been unfairly judged. The bundling of proprietary offers with a FOSS download is certainly problematic and GIMP’s decision to abandon the service was certainly justified. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that SourceForge now represents some evil that’s descended over our world, especially given the fact that SourceForge is a service for open source projects in general and isn’t limited to projects using free and open copyleft licenses such as the GPL. More at FOSS Force While it’s generally better not to judge too quickly, I think it’s reasonable that people are holding SourceForge to account for some of their decisions. People who download open source software do not expect to get other applications bundled with them. And the deceptive download ads from Google Adsense (which – as I pointed out earlier – can easily be blocked in the Adsense ad review center) certainly didn’t help matters. SourceForge has lost the trust of some users and they need to work toward getting it back. MATE and Debian It looks like MATE will soon be added to Debian’s repositories, according to Muktware. Please note that the Muktware site seems to be having problems as I write this, so you may have trouble clicking through. Hopefully they’ll get it fixed soon, if it isn’t by the time you read this. Fans of the MATE desktop environment, which is a fork of Gnome 2, will be happy to know that MATE is scheduled to be included in the official Debian repositories. I could not be given a definite time frame as to when we can expect to see MATE pop up in the official repositories, but I was assured that “it will definitely be ready for Jessie,” Jessie being the codename for the next stable “release” of Debian. Image credit: Muktware More at Muktware This is good news, MATE is a popular desktop environment. So it’s great that Debian users will be able to take advantage of it. Kudos to those involved in making it happen. You can check the status of MATE in Debian here. Angel Linux Screenshot Tour The Coding Studio has a screenshot tour of Angel Linux. Angel Linux is a Puppy-based lightweight desktop oriented Linux distribution. Image credit: The Coding Studio More at The Coding Studio I haven’t used Angel Linux, but since it’s based on Puppy it’s bound to have some fans out there. Check it out if you need a light-weight distribution. What’s your take on all this? Tell me in the comments below. Software DevelopmentOpen Source