[fusl]

I guess "This installer may include bundled offers." as a warning is not clear enough because it's not written in 72px red-colored bold text? Don't get me wrong, but, in my honest opinion, they make it clear on their own website that it includes bundled offers. I know many other open source projects that offer builds of their software for free, including "bundled offers", without any hint.

[netsharc]

Let's try to imagine what his thought processes were. And to do that I would try to put myself in his shoes and imagine what my thought processes would be: "I have this popular software, but I'm not getting rich out of it. What if I put crap adware with it. But that'd be dishonest and I would be helping the scammy/scummy side of the internet (1). Well, if I put a disclaimer on the download page, then it'd be the users' own damn fault if they miss it. And I'll make the download button extra big so they'll think 'I know what I need to do in this page, click' and miss the warning.".

(1) This is what I think about that section of the Internet, remember this is me putting myself in his shoes.

And at first I would feel guilty about scamming my users, but later on I would probably blame them for being stupid. And when others ask questions in the forum I would just reply tersely and arrogantly and say "It's all correct because I wrote a disclaimer.".

So, when you say "They make it clear", IMO that is very arguable. He (is the author of the software the same guy as the forum moderator, I'm getting the impression it's a one-man show) did the least he needed to do to be able to get away with installing crapware on their trusting clients' machines, because his aim is to make money, and he can make more money if less people notice the warning. I'm betting his lawyer told him he should write the warning on the download page, if I were him I would've thought about just putting a "By downloading you agree to the terms and conditions of the software being offered" with a link to a page with a wall of text, but probably his lawyer told him "that might be iffy."

This is a bit like Facebook saying they made it clear that they will copy SMSes and call logs from your phone...

[giancarlostoro]

The worst part is if he put that it's not to be used for commercial use (Windows version or something) and just sell commercial licenses he'd be rich and not have to deal with the crummy income he's getting from malvertisement. Let's be real, corporations will pay good money for convenience. Lots of companies still pay for Visual Studio and MSDN accounts even though they can get .NET Core and Visual Studio Code for free.

[EpicEng]

And what are these "offers" exactly? Are they applications someone will update actually want to install on their machine if they knew what they were? You can't actually be this obtuse.

[giancarlostoro]

I agree with you, and honestly if you were used to FileZilla just working and not having malware on it like I was you wouldnt even think about reading before downloading cause you've downloaded it a million times prior... Now I just don't bother with FileZilla, rather use SCP on a terminal.