In case you missed it, here’s the September developer mailing
Upgrade to the new SourceForge; PeaZip is Project of the Month; Looking for Developers.
- Upgrade to the new SourceForge
- PeaZip is Project of the Month
- Internet Success: A Study of Open-Source Software Commons – MIT Press
- Developers Wanted
- GSoC
- Top 20
- In Closing …
Thanks for being part of the SourceForge Community!
Upgrade to the new SourceForge
If you’re still using the old SourceForge, you’re missing out on the work that we’ve been doing for the last two years. It’s time to upgrade.
What do I get if I upgrade?
Upgrading your project to the new SourceForge gives you:
- More tightly integrated code browsing, issue tracking, and documentation
- Actively developed software, so that your requests for changes and features will be addressed in a timely manner
- Open Source – you can participate in the development of the SourceForge experience yourself, or write plugins that extend its functionality
At least as important – and you understand this if you’re a developer yourself – we can stop maintaining two diverging codebases, and focus on the one that matters. Once we’re able to retire the old code, we’ll be able to move twice as fast.
How do I upgrade?
Go to http://sf.net/p/upgrade and press the big upgrade button. Couldn’t be easier.
Who has already upgraded?
Well, for starters, we have. SourceForge itself is developed on SourceForge. In that way, we get to experience the platform as we’re working – eating our own dogfood, as the saying goes. In that way, we have a big incentive to fix problems as they come up, and we also know what features developers are likely to want, because we want them for ourselves.
Other interesting projects that have upgraded are:
VLC media player: VLC media player is a free and open source media player and multimedia framework written by the VideoLAN project. VLC is a portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various formats. http://sourceforge.net/projects/vlc
HandBrake: Convert between a wide variety of multimedia formats http://sourceforge.net/projects/handbrake
UNetbootin, Universal Netboot Installer: Create bootable Live Linux USB drives without burning a CD http://sourceforge.net/projects/unetbootin
Apache OpenOffice.org Templates: Templates for the Apache OpenOffice.org office suite http://sourceforge.net/projects/aoo-templates
ophcrack: Ophcrack is a Windows password cracker based on a time-memory trade-off using rainbow tables. This is a new variant of Hellman’s original trade-off, with better performance. It recovers 99.9% of alphanumeric passwords in seconds. http://sourceforge.net/projects/ophcrack
ClamWin Free Antivirus: Free Antivirus for Windows. http://sourceforge.net/projects/clamwin
… and about 70,000 other projects are on the new SourceForge. Don’t get left behind!
PeaZip is Project of the Month
We’re delighted to announce that PeaZip is the September 2012 Project of the Month. PeaZip is a free cross-platform file and archive manager utility that provides an unified portable GUI for many Open Source technologies like 7-Zip, FreeArc, PAQ, UPX. You can create: 7Z, ARC, BZ2, GZ, *PAQ, PEA, QUAD/BALZ, TAR, UPX, WIM, XZ, ZIP. And you can extract 150+ archive types: ACE, ARJ, CAB, DMG, ISO, LHA, RAR, UDF, ZIPX and more
Features of PeaZip includes extract, create and convert multiple archives at once, create self-extracting archives, split/join files, strong encryption with two factor authentication, encrypted password manager, secure deletion, find duplicate files, calculate hashes, export job definition as script.
You can read, or listen to, our interview with PeaZip at http://sourceforge.net/blog/potm-201209/
Also, don’t forget to vote for October’s Project of the Month at http://sourceforge.net/blog/potm_102012_vote/
Internet Success: A Study of Open-Source Software Commons – MIT Press
Several years ago, researchers Charlie Schweik and Bob English, and their team at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA, conducted a survey of SourceForge developers to answer the question of what makes some Open Source projects successful, while others are abandoned.
While this question has certainly been asked before, their research constitutes the first large-scale empirical study to look at social, technical, and institutional aspects of OSS, to address this question.
The survey went to over 50,000 of you, and over 1,400 of you actually responded, representing a broad cross-section of SourceForge projects. The original survey can be seen at http://www.umass.edu/opensource/schweik/documents/InitiationSurveyQuestionnaire.pdf and if you want to do your own analysis, the survey results can be obtained at http://www.umass.edu/opensource/schweik/documents/isurvey_responses.csv
The book looks at over forty factors that, based on earlier academic research, the authors thought might be important for OSS project success. These include everything from technical factors like OS and programming language to governance factors like software license, and social factors such as whether the developers of the project are geographically co-located, or spread across multiple continents and time zones.
Charlie and Bob want to thank you, the SourceForge community, for donating your valuable time to completing the survey and making their research possible. You can read the data they collected, as well as notes on their research methodology, on their website at http://www.umass.edu/opensource/schweik/supplementary.html and you can buy the entire book on Amazon, at http://tinyurl.com/d3e4545 We’re looking forward to reading more about their conclusions, and sharing some of those conclusions with you once our copy of the book arrives.
Last month we featured a couple of projects that are looking for developers, and this was a big hit, so we’re going to make it a regular feature of this mailing.
Comical (http://sourceforge.net/projects/comical) is a portable CBR and CBZ viewer written in C++ using wxWidgets. It supports multiple image formats and uses high-quality image scaling algorithms to fit pages onscreen. What that means to the rest of us is that this a reader for comic books. The project hasn’t had a release for a while, and is looking for new developers to rejuvenate it. If you want to get involved in Comical, contact the SourceForge community team at communityteam@sourceforge.net
Handbrake is looking for developers and graphic artists to assist on the project. You can read more at http://handbrake.fr/?article=14 and contact the community through the links there. Handbrake is an application that converts from many common multimedia file formats, including unprotected DVD or BluRay sources to a handful of modern output file formats.
The facile CMS project mentioned in a blog post at https://sourceforge.net/p/facilecms/blog/2012/09/if-you-code-i-need-you/ that new developers would be welcomed to the project. Facile is a new CMS project starting from the ground up to be simple and easy.
Members of the VirtualDubMod project (https://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualdubmod/) have indicated that, although the project has been dormant for a long time, the VirtualDub project on which it is based has progressed a long way in the meantime. It would be useful for someone to step in and bring it up to the present, so that the many people who download it every day are getting something that’s current.
The Nullsoft Scriptable Install System project (https://sourceforge.net/projects/nsis/) is a Windows install development tool. They’re looking for new developers to help out with the effort. They’d particularly like to have someone who would be willing to be a release manager, so that they can get out monthly releases in a standard manner.
Earlier in the year, we mentioned that 18% of all Google Summer of Code projects were SourceForge projects. (http://sourceforge.net/blog/gsoc-projects-2012/) The summer is over, and it’s time for those projects to present their results. And, so far, the results seem to be great. We’ve spoken with a number of projects about their summer, and the responses are all glowing. The consensus seems to be that it’s the best batch of summer students ever, and a number of projects are ready to push new releases based on that work.
Those interviews are all available on the SourceForge blog, at http://sourceforge.net/blog/tag/gsoc/, and there are more to come as projects wrap up those summer projects and integrate them into their releases.
Every month we like to show you the projects that have surged forward in one way or another over the last few weeks. Sometimes this is because of a new release. Sometimes it’s because they got a new developer on board who’s doing amazing things. We think you should be on the lookout for these projects.
Media Player Classic – Home Cinema: Home of Media Player Classic – Home Cinema. This project is based on the original Guliverkli project, and contains additional features and bug fixes (see complete list on the project’s Website). http://sourceforge.net/projects/mpc-hc
KeePass Password Safe: A free open source password manager. http://sourceforge.net/projects/keepass
Apache OpenOffice.org Extensions: Over 650 Extensions ready to use with Apache OpenOffice. http://sourceforge.net/projects/aoo-extensions
Megacubo: Megacubo is a IPTV tuner application written in PHP + Winbinder. It has a catalogue of links of TV streams which are available for free in the web. Runs on Windows(2000, XP, Vista and Seven). http://sourceforge.net/projects/megacubo-br
Classic Shell: Classic Shell adds some missing features to Windows 7 and Vista like a classic start menu, toolbar for Explorer and others. http://sourceforge.net/projects/classicshell
Code::Blocks: Free, open-source, cross-platform C/C++ IDE http://sourceforge.net/projects/codeblocks
Notepad++ Plugins: Notepad++ plugins is a collection of tools which plays a role of completion for Notepad++. This project contains Explorer, Function List, Hex Editor, Spell Checker and a console program NppExec. Other plugin developers are invited to share their projects http://sourceforge.net/projects/npp-plugins
Lazarus: Rapid applications development tool and libraries for FPC http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus
GNU Octave Repository: Central storage place for script and function files used with GNU Octave. http://sourceforge.net/projects/octave
Celestia: Real-time 3D visualization of space http://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia
DrJava: DrJava is a lightweight programming environment for Java designed to foster test-driven software development. It includes an intelligent program editor, an interactions pane for evaluating program text, a source level debugger, and a unit testing tool. http://sourceforge.net/projects/drjava
Wineskin: Turn Windows programs and games into Mac OS X apps. http://sourceforge.net/projects/wineskin
avidemux-mswin: Avidemux builds for Microsoft Windows http://sourceforge.net/projects/avidemux-mswin
TurnKey Linux: TurnKey Linux is an opensource project that aims to develop high-quality software appliances that are easy to deploy, easy to use and free. In a nutshell, we believe everything that can be easy, should be easy! http://www.turnkeylinux.org/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/turnkeylinux
Maxima — GPL CAS based on DOE-MACSYMA: Maxima is a fairly complete computer algebra system written in Common Lisp with an emphasis on symbolic computation. It is based on DOE-MACSYMA and licensed under the GPL. Its abilities include symbolic integration, 3D plotting, and an ODE solver. http://sourceforge.net/projects/maxima
emule Xtreme Mod: emule client, based on official emule version (see www.emule-project.net)
many enhancements and bugfixes, for details see provided changelog http://sourceforge.net/projects/emulextreme
SmartCam: SmartCam – Smart Phone Web Camera – Turns a camera phone (S60, WinMo6.x, Android, Samsung Bada) with bluetooth or WiFi into a handy webcam ready to use with your PC http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartcam
NAS4Free: NAS4Free is an embedded Open Source Storage distribution and supports sharing across Windows, Apple, and UNIX-like systems. It includes ZFS, Software RAID (0,1,5), disk encryption, S.M.A.R.T / email reports etc. with following protocols: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, TFTP, AFP, RSYNC, Unison, iSCSI, UPnP, Bittorent (initiator and target) and all this is highly configurable by it’s WEB interface. http://sourceforge.net/projects/nas4free
PeaZip: PeaZip is a free cross-platform file and archive manager utility that provides an unified portable GUI for many Open Source technologies like 7-Zip, FreeArc, PAQ, UPX. Create: 7Z, ARC, BZ2, GZ, *PAQ, PEA, QUAD/BALZ, TAR, UPX, WIM, XZ, ZIP Extract 150+ archive types: ACE, ARJ, CAB, DMG, ISO, LHA, RAR, UDF, ZIPX and more. http://sourceforge.net/projects/peazip
As always, thanks for being part of the SourceForge community. Every day, we’re amazed at your passion, and we’re impressed by the code that you release. Keep it up!
If you’re not following us on Twitter, you should. Every day, we tweet about a bunch of projects that have released something amazing. http://twitter.com/sourceforge
Our Facebook page the posts are a less frequent, but there, too, we’ll tell you about projects that are doing great things. https://www.facebook.com/sourceforgenet
And, of course, there’s our blog – http://sf.net/blog – where we post longer articles about our projects and our service.
Until next month …
The SourceForge Community Team
communityteam@sourceforge.net
https://sourceforge.net/u/proweb365/wiki/Home/