Target’s Cyber Week deals of the day for Tuesday, December 1st

To clarify, there are . However, I always took PDFCreator (sf.net) as a legitimate open source project.

The PDFCreator Toolbar is apparently implemented using “mybrowserbar”. As per their , they indicate:

f) modify your Microsoft Internet Explorer and/or Mozilla Firefox browser settings for the default search engine, address bar search, “DNS error” page, “404 error” page, and new tab page to facilitate more informative responses as determined by The Toolbar;

mybrowserbar.com “Company Information” redirects to www.spigot.com, which claims to be “Coming in March 2009”. spigot.com is a proxied domain, so there’s no further information available.

I downloaded and investigated the , and the source of the browser toolbar installer is nowhere to be found (indeed, the .exe included with the installer isn’t present). There’s , one of the developers, in the pdfforge.org forum which sheds a little light on the browser toolbar. I completely empathize with his desire to make some money from his open source work; however, I’d disagree that this is an appropriate approach, and at the very least, the toolbar install option should be more up-front about it.

It’s unfortunate to see a long-time, responsible open source project act this way, and I do hope it’s an honest mistake. I wanted to give people the heads-up who may not be aware of this.