For those that missed the August community mailing, here it is:
Thanks for being part of the SourceForge community!
Based on the huge amount of feedback we’ve received over the last month, we’re going to try a few new things in this newsletter. Please let us know what you think.
XOOPS Is Project Of The Month
First of all, congratulations to XOOPS for winning the August SourceForge Project Of The Month. XOOPS is a web content management system with a rich community of plugins and extensions. You can read more about XOOPS (or listen to the podcast) on the SourceForge blog.
As you probably know by now, the Project Of The Month is selected by your votes. Vote for the September POTM at http://twtpoll.com/lsm1vk
OSCON
A few weeks ago a few of us from SourceForge were at OSCON–the O’Reilly Open Source Convention–in Portland Oregon, where over 3,000 Open Source enthusiasts gathered to learn, socialize, and generally geek out.
In addition to attending numerous great sessions about a variety of topics–community management, Perl best practices, home automation–we led an evening session about Allura. Allura is the Forge software that powers SourceForge, and it recently entered the Apache Incubator. In our BOF (Birds Of a Feather) session, people already involved in the Allura incubation, and those who were interested in getting involved, discussed the Allura project, and how the Incubation will affect the future of SourceForge.
SourceForge remains committed to Open Source and to hosting projects. We’re excited about the Apache Allura incubation, and this opportunity to tap into the strengths of the Apache Software Foundation. You can follow the progress of the incubation on the Apache Incubator website and if you want to try out Allura today, you can upgrade your SourceForge projects today!
We also had the opportunity to meet and speak with numerous other community managers–counterparts in other sections of the Open Source world–and compare notes on how to help projects be successful. Although we represent different organizations and different segments of Open Source, we all have a unifying passion–seeing Open Source succeed and seeing people benefit from using and participating in these projects. So we were able to trade tips and come away with new things to try.
You’ll see some of these things show up in the SourceForge blog over the coming months, as well as in these newsletters.
Open Source conferences, like OSCON, are always valuable for the session content, but they’re always most valuable for the so-called “hallway track”–talking with colleagues from across the industry over a meal, or a drink, or just hanging out and hacking on code together. These kinds of interactions are really valuable in giving another perspective, and we usually come back from these conferences with a renewed passion and new ideas.
Blog and Podcasts
We’re trying to get the blog back up to its pre-summer levels, and we’ve had a pretty busy month. Since the last newsletter, we’ve had a number of great projects in our studio (virtually speaking). If you missed them, you should listen to these podcasts.
* John Mertic from the SugarCRM project spoke with Rich about the project and the company behind it. SugarCRM is customer relationship management software. The recording was actually from the PHP|Tek conference in Chicago in May, but somehow Rich didn’t get it pushed out for a while. John is very patient.
* Next, we spoke with Jitspoe from the Paintball2 project. Paintball 2 is a first-person shooter game based on the open sourced Quake game engine. You’re armed with a paintball gun, making the game great for younger players who don’t need to see blood all over the place.
* The Project Of The Month–XOOPS–also had a podcast, as noted above.
New feature showcase
We’d like to show off two new features on the SourceForge developer experience.
The first is ticket voting. Now, when a ticket is created in your issue tracking system, users can vote up or down on that ticket to indicate their support for the feature or bug being reported. You can then order tickets by the number of votes, so that you know you’re working on the things that your users want the most.
Note that you’ll need to upgrade your project to the latest version of SourceForge in order to take advantage of this new feature. A project admin can then enable or disable this feature in the ticket tracker settings.
Next, we’ve got an enhancement to our project download statistics page. The download stats per country now shows a breakdown of downloads per operating system, per country. See, for example, the statistics for the OpenOffice project.
By the way, typically, when you see “Unknown” listed as the operating system in statistics on SourceForge, that usually means that a download was performed by an auto-updater, rather than via a browser visiting a download page.
Looking for developers
We wanted to point out a couple of projects that are looking for developers to either help in the development, or possibly even to adopt the project from the original developers.
The BO2k project has developed a remote administration tool for Windows systems, with client-side applications for Windows and Linux. But several years have gone by since the last release, and the developers have all moved on to other things. If you have any coding experience in this area, or if you’re interested in learning, this would be a great way to start. There’s also a related project, wxbo2k, that implements a client for the server. If you’re interested, please get in touch with us.
Likewise, the CircleDock project has been on hiatus for some time, but still gets lots of downloads. It implements a circular, oval, or spiral dock for Windows. If you’re interested in adopting this project, the current development team will welcome you with open arms. Either get in touch with them, or directly with us.
We can be reached at communityteam@sourceforge.net if you want to know more about these projects.
HFOSS – Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software
We love Open Source. We’re impressed daily and, in some cases, amazed, at the elegant, cool, and downright weird projects that people devote their spare time to producing. We love it when passion translates into producing something that other people can use, extend, and benefit from.
We’re also impressed, and humbled, by the projects that, in some way, make the world a better place, or relieve the suffering of some fellow human being.
Over the last month, we’ve spoken with a number of people who are involved in what is known as HFOSS – Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software. These are projects, like the OpenMRS project, or Literacy Bridge, which rather than writing software for one’s personal benefit, produce code and products for someone less fortunate, whose life will be improved by our effort.
We heartily encourage you to work on projects that are just fun, and projects that solve your own problems and needs. But we also encourage you to look around for projects that help others, and see how you can contribute to them, with code, documentation, or just by telling someone else about them.
Top 20
Each month we include the top 20 list. These aren’t necessarily the projects that are the biggest, or receive the most downloads, but are the ones that had the highest percentage growth in the last month. That way, hopefully, each month you’re seeing a different list, and learning about a few projects you’ve not seen before.
So, here they are:
ClamWin Free Antivirus
Free Antivirus for Windows. Includes virus scanner, scheduler, virus database updates, context menu integration to MS Windows Explorer and Addin to MS Outlook. Also features easy setup program. Uses a well respected ClamAV scanning engine.
WinDjView
WinDjView is a fast, compact and powerful DjVu viewer for Windows with tabbed interface, continuous scrolling and advanced printing options, based on free DjVuLibre library. MacDjView is a simple DjVu viewer for Mac OS X, also with continuous scrolling.
qBittorrent
An advanced and multi-platform BitTorrent client with a nice Qt4 user interface as well as a Web UI for remote control and an integrated search engine. qBittorrent aims to meet the needs of most users while using as little CPU and memory as possible.
Classic Shell
Classic Shell adds some missing features to Windows 7 and Vista like a classic start menu, toolbar for Explorer and others.
HiJackThis
HijackThis is a free utility that generates an in depth report of registry and file settings from your computer. HijackThis makes no separation between safe and unsafe settings in its scan results giving you the ability to selectively remove items from your machine. In addition to this scan and remove capability HijackThis comes with several tools useful in manually removing malware from a computer.
Firefox
Firefox is the Mozilla Project’s web browser. Your online security is our top priority. Firefox includes strict anti-phishing and anti-malware measures, plus easy ways to tell the good guys from the bad like our new one-click site ID info. In the end, it’s all about you being able to do what you need to do on the Web. And with features like built-in spell checking, session restore and full zoom—not to mention more than 5,000 available add-ons—nobody makes it easier, helps you work better or saves you more time than Firefox.
Eclipse and Java Video Tutorials
Free video screencam tutorials for Eclipse and Java. Includes “Eclipse and Java for Total Beginners”, “Using the Eclipse Workbench”, “Introducing Persistence”, and “Using the Debugger”. Intended for beginning and intermediate users and programmer
PNG reference library: libpng
Reference library for supporting the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format.
Ultimate Edition
Ultimate Edition Linux, previously “Ubuntu Ultimate Edition”. We cater to a large base of *nix users including, but certainly not limited to gamers & low resource computers. We have a Ultimate Edition for virtually any user.
OSClass for classifieds
With OSClass, get your own classifieds website for free. Using this script, you can provide free advertising for items for sale, real estate, jobs, cars…
Hattrick Organizer
Helper Tool for online-manager Hattrick (www.hattrick.org)
Elastix
Elastix is an appliance software that integrates the best tools available for Asterisk-based PBXs into a easy-to-use interface. It also adds its own set of utilities to make it the best software package available for open source telephony.
- Comical
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.
America’s Army 2.5 Assist
A GUI client application for Downloading Installing and Playing Americas Army 2.5 on Windows, Mac and Linux with a new custom authorization system. On the server side a Desktop server manager for Windows, Mac and Linux and a Command line dedicated server manager for Windows and Linux. Backend server components include a replacement authorization system using the Battletracker account & stats database and a PunkBuster log streaming server which records players possible cheating activities. aa25assist.sourceforge.net aa25.org forum.aa25.org
WillowTree#
WillowTree# is a save editor for Borderlands written in C#. It can read, edit, and convert savegame files from PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 versions of the Borderlands game. It has a storage locker that can be used to transfer items between characters.
CoRD
CoRD is a Mac OS X remote desktop client for Windows servers running Microsoft Remote Desktop or Terminal Services.
- ABC [Yet Another Bittorrent Client]
ABC is a Bittorrent client which supports a queueing system with priority, global and local preferences for downloading torrents, multiple upload options for completed files, an adjustable display, and remote access via a web service.
Adium
Adium is an open source, multi-protocol instant messaging application for Mac OS X.
UltraStar Deluxe
Karaoke game inspired by the Singstar™ game available on the Playstation®. It allows up to six players to sing along with music using microphones in order to score points, depending on the pitch of the voice and the rhythm of singing.
In closing …
We know, this was a longer than usual newsletter. We had a lot to say. Thanks for getting this far.
If you’d like any help in promoting your project, please don’t hesitate to let us know. (communityteam@sourceforge.net) It’s what we’re here for. If you’d like to do a podcast about your project, or an email interview, for the blog, or if you’d just like for us to publicize a release for you on Twitter (@sourceforge), send us a quick note. Our other Twitter account, @sfnet_ops, is where we announce site outages and other site problems, as well as updates about the site. And we also have a page on Facebook, where you can connect to other SourceForge fans, and see our longer news updates.
If you have anything you’d like to talk with us about–the site, your project, the newsletter, or Open Source in general, you can contact us at communityteam@sourceforge.net.
Once again, thanks for being part of the SourceForge community!
Rich, for the Community Team