[Onavo]

It's nice until you get spammed with emails from angry users. I think it happened to the sqlite and other popular open source project authors. Non technical users think they are polluting their computer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42358470

[rascul]

It happened to thttpd

https://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/repo.html

[Alive-in-2025]

The person in that thread could explain the situation a lot more better to the non technical users. You could do this:

"I don't know what happened to your computer but you seem to be saying someone hacked your computer and installed some software and you found acme.com mentioned on it. This was not done by me. acme.com is open source software that is freely available to anyone. This is the same as if someone installed software on your computer that mentions the google chrome web browser - that would not indicate google had anything to do with that action, since google chrome is freely available too."

[pseudohadamard]

This is why our temp files have names like malware_dropper.exe and bitcoin_scam.xls. If anyone sees those they assume it's some virus and don't bother us with them.