Sourceforge History: Slide 3

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     <p align="right"> &mdash; Samuel Clemens (nom de plume: Mark Twain)</p></blockquote>
 </section>
 
+<section>
+  <h3>The VA Linux / Sourceforge Debacle</h3>
+  <img align="left" height="50%" src="sourceforge-drifting-fsfe.png" />
+
+  <p class="copious" align="right">Search
+  “Dachary FSF Europe Sourceforge drifting” to find
+  <a href="https://fsfe.org/news/2001/article2001-10-20-01.en.html">https://fsfe.org/news/2001/article2001-10-20-01.en.html</a> &amp; read in
+  real time.</p>
+</section>
+
+
 
 
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 <!-- NO ONE BUT BKUHN EDIT BELOW YET: -->
 
 
+
+
 <section>
  <h3 >Follow-Up / Talk License</h3>
  <p>I have a keynote about another interesting topic tomorrow:

what-bkuhn-was-going-to-say.md

@@ -81,3 +81,58 @@ of the room has their hands up.
 
 Note that early on, we said Sourceforge.  This is an interesting piece of
 history that most don't know: [ switch slides ]
+
+## Sourceforge History: Slide 3
+
+Sourceforge is a very interesting case.  Most younger developers may not
+know that in the late 1990s, Sourceforge (and forge software in general) was
+a revolution in FOSS development.  Until that time, there were no 
+websites that provided integrated version control, bug tracking, developer
+discussion, and continuing integration.  It was a patchwork of systems
+before that, and Sourceforge was extremely exiting to lifelong FOSS
+developers precisely because the need for better solutions was so great.
+
+VA Linux initially was a good community actor: they released the entire
+codebase of Sourceforge under GPL, and many contributors began to work
+upstream on Sourceforge itself.
+
+During the dot.com boom, VA Linux IPOed under the ticket symbol LNUX.  Like
+airline scams of the 1920s, where companies named themselves with ticker
+symbols that sounded like airlines, many people thought that they were
+buying stock in this new operating system they were just hearing about, not
+one of many service companies in the space. 
+
+By late 2001, the dot.com boom was over, LNUX stock had tanked, and, as most
+FOSS companies do when times are tough, VA Linux ran to the oldest
+scam in the software industry: licensing all their software that they could
+as proprietary.
+
+There's a link in the slides to an excellent article at the FSF Europe from
+October 2001 (written by Loïc Dachary), that describes VA Linux's behavior.
+As Loïc points out in his article, VA Linux did underhanded tactics to
+pressure developers to assign copyrights so that VA Linux could relicense 
+Sourceforge wholly proprietary.
+
+As a side note, this was one of the catalysts for the creation of the Affero
+GPL.  In this case, since all the HTML and Javascript files were also GPL'd,
+VA Linux needed universal copyright assignment to proceed with a wholly
+proprietary product.  Ultimately only a few developers like Loïc refused to
+assign copyright, but VA Linux as the overwhelming majority copyright holder
+simply wrote their changes out of the software, and relicensed.
+
+We definitely encourage you to read Loïc's essay on FSF Europe's site,
+because he makes a truly excellent point: that the Free Software community
+could “Fork and ignore”: IOW, take the last GPL'd version that was released
+as a gift to the community, and proceed development from there — ignoring
+sourceforge entirely.
+
+There was a somewhat golden period after that from 2001 until about
+mid-2004.  Sourcforge, quite unsurprisingly, rather quickly switch to an
+ad-based system whereby they would show you an add if you wanted to download
+a tar.gz file of a project.  Developers were truly stuck: SFC's own Inkscape
+project spent *years* well into the 2010s trying to fully divorce from
+Sourceforge, and ironically, the successor in interest, Sourceforce, Inc.,
+realized Inkscape downloads were one of their largest downloaded projects,
+and constantly pitched us toxic revenue-sharing schemes until Inkscape
+finally escaped Sourceforge.
+