Hotscripts, Cnet and Sourceforge

Hotscripts, download.com and Sourceforge seem to be heading in opposite directions.

Until recently hotscripts did not discriminate between commercial and free products. According to their latest updates, unless you cough up the fees for a premium listing ($38/quarter last time I checked), commercial products are going to be relegated to the bottom of the heap.

CNET/Download.com is heading in the other direction. Though popularly thought of as a shareware site, only commercial products were listed in it for the simple reason that you have to cough up a minimum of $9.00 per month to be listed in their directory. That however has changed.

Now you can list products (be they commercial of free) free of charge on CNET. Paid listings get better placement at all that but at least now open source vendors will be able to get their products listed on it. As chance would have it this change has just come about after I renewed almost all our listings on their directory. Some of the listings do not generate much in the way of traffic and had the free option been available a month ago, I would have jumped at it.

And what of sourceforge.net? it's going now where. Their statistics pages have not been updated for more than three months, yet inspite of that they somehow manage to pick a project of the month. The only way they can possibly do that is by drawing lots.