• MinGW-builds

  Snapshots and releases builds of the MinGW compiler that use CRT & WinAPI from the mingw-w64 project.

• WOT – addons

  Add-ons for the game World Of Tanks. Stiahni si čo chceš… Nahadzujem sem addony pre WOT , vylepši si svoju hru novým zemeriavačom, skinmy, damage panelmi…atď

• PMD

  PMD is a source code analyzer. It finds common programming flaws like unused variables, empty catch blocks, unnecessary object creation, and so forth. It supports Java, JavaScript, XML, XSL. Additionally it includes CPD, the copy-paste-detector. CPD finds duplicated code in Java, C, C++, C#, PHP, Ruby, Fortran, JavaScript.

• ZABBIX

  ZABBIX is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution designed to monitor and track performance and availability of network servers, devices and other IT resources. It supports distributed and WEB monitoring, auto-discovery, and more.

• TV-Browser – A free EPG

  TV-Browser is a java-based TV guide which can be easily extended with lots of plugins. It is designed to look like your paper TV guide.

• pseint

  PSeInt is a pseudo-code interpreter for spanish-speaking programming students. Its main purpose is to be a tool for learning and understanding the basic concepts about programming and applying them with an easy understanding spanish pseudocode.

• MPC-BE

  Media Player Classic – BE is a free and open source audio and video player for Windows. Media Player Classic – BE is based on the original “Media Player Classic” project (Gabest) and “Media Player Classic Home Cinema” project (Casimir666), contains additional features and bug fixes.

• Album Art Downloader

  The Album Art Downloader is a program designed to make life easier for anyone who wishes to find and update their album art for their music collection. The sources for the pictures can be defined by creating plugin scripts.

• ReactOS

  ReactOS is an open source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with applications and drivers written for the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003).

I spoke with Reinhard Pointner via email last week (since he’s 13 time zones over from me!) about the project and his involvement in it.

Rich: What is Filebot? What does it do?

Reinhard: It’s really just about renaming and organising episode and movie files. It’s gonna make sense of pretty much any kind of filename and match it against online databases for additional metadata like episode titles, movie genres etc. Next to that it’ll allow you to download subtitles for your files and create or check SFV files.

Rich: What’s the technology stack?

Reinhard: Java for most of the application base, Swing for the GUI and then Groovy as scripting engine for user scripts. FileBot uses quite a few 3rd party libraries like miglayout, nekohtml, ehcache, jna, mediainfo, 7zip-jbindings etc

Rich: What led you to start the Filebot project?

Reinhard: To scratch a personal itch, as they say. Also there weren’t any proper tools for renaming episodes, downloading subtitle or checking SFV files, just loads of half-baked projects. Someone just had to fix that.

Rich: How is it that six years later there’s still more to do? What’s coming in future versions of Filebot?

There’s always corner-cases with the filename-based auto-detection logic but it’s pretty mature now.
At some point it’d be cool I could build a big database of hashes and metadata so files can be matched to episode or movie data with perfect accuracy.
Subtitle upload has been on the list as well for a long time.

Rich: How can other folks get involved in your project?

Reinhard: Quite easily. Just write tutorials. There’s not a lot information out there, especially not good tutorial for various use-cases.

Also the format expressions for episode/movie naming and user scripts for automation can be written easily by advanced users and provided for other people to just copy and paste.

Again, we need tutorials tutorials tutorials and more tutorials.

Rich: Congratulations again, and good luck with your project!

• Greenshot

  Screenshot tool optimized for productivity. Save a screenshot or a part of the screen to a file within a second. Apply text and shapes to the screenshot. Offers capture of window, region or full screenshot. Supports several image formats. Imprint: http://getgreenshot.org/imprint/

• ZenTao project & scrum tool

  ZenTaoPMS is an open source project management system with product management, project management, bug management, testcase management, doc management, todo management and many other features in one application. ZenTaoPMS is also a scrum tool.

• TeXstudio – A LaTeX Editor

  TeXstudio is a fully featured LaTeX editor. Our goal is to make writing LaTeX documents as easy and comfortable as possible. Some of the outstanding features of TeXstudio are an integrated pdf viewer with (almost) word-level synchronization, live inline preview, advanced syntax-highlighting, live checking of references, citations, latex commands, spelling and grammar. Find out more at our website.

• Battle for Wesnoth

  The Battle for Wesnoth is a n open-source turn-based tactical strategy game with a high fantasy theme, featuring both single-player, and online/hotseat multiplayer combat. Fight a desperate battle to reclaim the throne of Wesnoth, or take hand in any number of other adventures.

• DC++

  This is a project aimed at producing a file sharing client using the ADC protocol. It also supports connecting to the Direct Connect network.

• Hibernate

  Hibernate – Relational Persistence for Idiomatic Java

• FileBot

  FileBot is the ultimate tool for renaming your movies, tv shows or anime and downloading subtitles. It’s smart, streamlined for simplicity and just works. FileBot supports Windows, Linux and Mac, plus there’s a full-featured command-line interface for all sorts of automation.

• Gallery

  A slick, intuitive web based photo gallery. Gallery is easy to install, configure and use. Gallery photo management includes automatic thumbnails, resizing, rotation, and more. Authenticated users and privileged albums make this great for communities

Project support page
Project website
Community site
Download

As you know, a picture is better than a thousand words, and a video is even better! So we’ll start with a video demo of SuperTuxKart 0.8:

Rich: Congratulations on winning the POTM for April, 2013.

Joerg: Thank you! And thanks a lot for having us here

Rich: Tell us about STK. What is it?

Joerg: STK is a kart racing game. It’s mostly a kids friendly game, but a lot of adults are playing it. Its focus is fun game play, not realism.

Rich: How long have you been doing this?

Joerg: I restarted the project around 6 years ago. At this time the original project was basically dead, left in a better looking, but unplayable state. I started to fix things here and there, and suddenly I had restarted the project. Another developer joined me, and we were able to do a very first release. Since then auria has joined the project, and we have made some huge progress with the game.

Rich: How many people are actively involved in the development of this project?

Joerg: At this stage, there are two people doing the actual coding of STK, one person who is implementing and managing our addon server. Then one artist who works mostly on tracks. On top of that there are some coders who submit a patch or two if they find something that they think needs to be improved, and several people from the community doing textures, icons, tracks and karts.

Auria and myself are managing the project now, and doing the actual coding. Stephen is our addon-expert, and samuncle the artist. Additionally we have Arthur doing the blog posts, and helping with the community. And there are translators who make the game available in different languages.

Rich: I’ve noticed, in game projects, that there’s a much broader set of talents involved than in many other projects. Coders, certainly, but also musicians, artists, and usability people. Who else am I missing?

Joerg: Yes, a game needs people with a variety of backgrounds. We heavily rely on testers, but also have people doing the blog posts, tweets (which we only started recently), and helping people getting started. We have a very friendly community, so new comer who want to help out with a thing or two will easily find help there.

Besides musician we also need sound effects, and generally people coming up with ideas. We do a lot of brainstorming in our forums, discussing ideas backwards and forwards till we get something that will really enhance the game.

Rich: What sorts of things do you typically put on Twitter? Tips? Release information?

Joerg: We have only recently started to use twitter, mainly because of the potm voting. We try to keep people up-to-date with development on STK, show off new features before they are available in a release. Artists use it to show tracks they are working on, and coders might inform about other new features that they are working on. ATM it’s a little bit quiet, since the core team is working on the GSoC application, but once this is done, we will keep it more up-to-date.

Rich: So, GSoC? What are you going to have a student work on?

Joerg: GSoC is a project funded by google, in which student are being paid to work on open source project. It’s the first time that we are trying to apply, and if we are accepted, we will have a interesting list of projects to work on. Our overview page is at http:/supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/GSoC_overview, which links to the list of ideas. We are mostly focusing on getting started with network multiplayer, one of the most requested features of STK.

Rich: Sweet

Joerg: There are nine suggested projects in there, and while the full network multiplayer is too much for a GSoC project, important blocks will hopefully be implemented in two projects (if we get selected for GSoC that is). We have a very experienced team of mentors, all of which are professionally working in the IT area, and we even have a professional game engine developer available.

Hopefully this will be very good for the students participating, in that they get some real life coding experience, but also for STK.

Rich: The way that you talk about the project, it sounds almost like a professional venture. How do you find time to have this much passion about it?

Joerg: I do nearly all of my work on the train to and back from work, which is nearly 2 hours a day. Then I’ll add some time in the evening and/or weekend. It is certainly very encouraging to receive acknowledgement, be it in form of POTM, or seeing that STK is used in research projects like Microsoft’s IllumiRoom and others, or even to see that STK was used in a TV show

Many parents are happy to have STK, since it’s free and kids friendly, and allows them play togehter with their kids.

Rich: TV show? Do tell.
Joerg: Around 4.5 years ago we were approached by the producers of “Friday Night Lights“. They needed a video game to be shown in one episode, and the professional companies didn’t want their games to be used (it was in the context of underage drinking).

So they came to us, and we were happy to get STK on TV this way

Rich: That’s so cool.

Joerg: Yes, it’s those little success stories that make work on STK so rewarding.

STK has been ported to a ‘one switch’ version which can be played by people suffering from motion impairment, which, imho, shows the strength of open source development

Rich: If someone wanted to get involved in this project, other than playing it, what opportunities are there?

Auria: we can get help from people from a variety of backgrounds. Non-coders can first help with translations, and documentation. Then we have a great need of modellers who know Blender well to help improve or make new tracks
Auria: programmers are also of course very much welcome. We have a good list of much-requested features to code, that we could certainly get help with

Rich: What language(s) is the project developed in?

Auria: The core of the game is developped in C++. Some libraries used include Bullet for physics, Irrlicht for graphics, and OpenAL for audio. Beyond C++ there are also blender extensions written in python, and the addons website (which will hopefully evolve into a multiplayer lobby someday) written in PHP.

Rich: What’s planned for the future? Anything exciting to look forward to in the next release?

Joerg: The most exciting feature is native support for wiimote. We are currently working on some portability issues, but hope to get the solved for the next release. We will have two new game modes – a soccer mode for split screen play, and a ‘Find the Easter Bunnies’ more targeted for kids

Online multiplayer is probably the most important outstanding feature of STK, but it will take some time before we will have this ready. It is currently plannd to become 0.9, but we will have more releases in the 0.8 series to gradually introduce features for that:

Adding a lobby, in-game voting for addons, online highscores, playing against ghost recorded by other people, a tutorial and achievements. Hopefully part of this will be done as part of GSoC.

Rich: Thanks so much for your time, and congratulations again.

Joerg: Thanks so much for having us!

Rich: SourceForge is delighted to announce that the March project of the month is Postbooks. Postbooks is an ERP and I’m speaking with Ned Lilly, who is the CEO of xTuple, the company behind this project, to talk about what that means, and where the project is going.

If you’d like to have your project featured on the SourceForge podcast, just drop me a note and we’ll schedule something.

If the embedded audio player below doesn’t work for you, you can download the audio in mp3 or ogg formats.

You can subscribe to this, and future podcasts, in iTunes or elsewhere, at http://feeds.feedburner.com/sourceforge/podcasts, and it’s also listed in the iTunes store.

Congratulations on winning the project of the month.

Ned: Thanks. We’re excited about it.

Rich: The vote was much closer than we’ve seen in years past – I guess you followed that.

Ned: Yeah, it really was like a race. I was picturing the TuxKart guys in their little graphics going up and down. Hopefully they’ll have another bite at the apple, because it sounds like there was a larger number of votes than you often see.

Rich: Let’s talk about Postbooks. For people that aren’t really familiar with it, can you give us an overview of what it is, what it does, and in what kind of business somebody would want to use it.

Ned: Postbooks is a full featured ERP, Accounting, and CRM application that we developed, ourselves, from scratch. xTuple, the company, has been around for about eleven years, and Postbooks has been on SourceForge, free and Open Source, for … since the summer of ’07, so, five and half years. It’s had a good steady stream of popularity. We’ve got a good community of … last guess, probably 30,000 active users. In a nutshell – I said ERP, Accounting, and CRM, so it’s the next step up from a desktop accounting package like Quickbooks or Peachtree, but it scales up to full featured ERP that competes with Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, and the R3 product. And we’ve had people move to our ERP from just about any package you’ve heard of. Postbooks is he core, and it’s licensed under the CPAL license, which is successor to the Mozilla Plus Attribution.

It’s been great. Ever since we’ve had a steadily growing community.

Rich: I guess at some level ever company needs something like this. Is this primarily aimed at the enterprise, or is this something that could be used in non profits? Who are your users?

Ned: That’s a great question. Our roots are in inventory based businesses, so, in manufacturing, distribution, there’s a lot of good tools for that kind of stuff in the product, but we’ve got plenty of people that don’t carry any inventory that are some type of services. We use it ourselves to run xTuple, and it’s not like we’ve got a warehouse full of floppy disks or anything. In addition to all of the standard ERP stuff you’d expect, in the way of inventory manufacturing distribution, there’s time and expense management that’s tightly integrated with the accounting. Anybody that’s got a professional services capability in their business can automate a lot of that. Non-profits are an interesting area for us because we have project … there’s integrated project tracking management as well, and then we have an add-on called project accounting which allows you to do financial reporting by project, and track that kind of stuff. That’s pretty similar to the fund accounting that a lot of non-profits are organized around.

One of the fundamental ideas behind Postbooks is that accounting is accounting – It’s not like there have been fifty new and exciting ways to build a general ledger introduced in the past thirty years. You’ve got your debits and you’ve got your credits, pretty much. It’s a good candidate for Open Source because there’s a horizontal core of common functionality that any business would, could, and should use. And then we’ve got the fully integrated CRM as well. That’s something you see in a lot of low-end ERP and accounting packages.

Rich: Tell me about the relationship between your company and the community side of things. What parts of your business are not Open Source? How does that work for you guys.

Ned: Postbooks is sort of the core of the product. The two key technologies are the Postgres database on the server side and the GUI client is built with QT, the C++ framework. Those are the two core technologies. The GUI client that you download from SourceForge, depending on what database it’s talking to, could be Postbooks, or it could be one of our commercially licensed editions that adds bigger company functionality. The GUI client is exactly the same. Building out from the core of Postbooks, we have what we call the standard edition, which has some more distribution type functionality for companies that have multiple warehouses and are doing some planning, and lot and serial control, and that kind of stuff across multiple warehouses. We have a manufacturing edition, which adds some some manufacturing specific functionality. And then we have an enterprise edition which is everything with the kitchen sink. A couple of other packages people have build over the years. The difference between those editions is just additional tables and whatnot being created via script in the postgres database. We have an updater tool that you can also download from SourceForge, which does both updating you from one release to another – updating your database – as well as upgrading from one edition to another. The key there is that it’s the same code base, and that any contributions – any enhancements that anybody makes to one version of the product have the potential to flow through all of them.

Rich: On the community side, do most of the contributions to the product come from within your company, or from the community? And to add on to end of that, if I want to become involved in your community, where can I plug in?

Ned: Since we sort of originated the project, it’s more the model where one company started it and is the big fish in the pond. We do have an active community of contributors as well as users and participants in various forms – bug tracking and so forth. We’ve got a great deal of developer-oriented documentation on the website that goes into how you can get involved in developing both the core and we have a capacity for scripted add-on packages. QT has a variant of Javascript that allows for modifying screens in a GUI application. And we have a package management system for rounding up all those changes that you might make to individual screens and scripts and functionalities and bring them into one package. The one great example that is a guy in New Zealand who jumped into a conversation about fixed assets on our website, and people start talking about does this functionality exist somewhere, and someone else says no, it doesn’t exist in xTuple but here’s how I’ve seen it in other packages, and they start this design conversation in the forums, and it evolves into a spec document and this guy coded it up as a package. He actually ended up building a concentric circles model like we do for our products. There’s a core fixed assets module that you download for free. And then he’s got additional functionality that for a couple of hundred bucks you can add depreciation schedules and integration with the general ledger and that kind of stuff. It’s neat to see the free/open source community model and the ability for community members to have some economic gain in this too.

Rich: What’s the future? Where are you going with the project? What are the exciting things on the horizon?

Ned: I mentioned that we’re moving over to Git. The reason for that, or the work that we’re doing there is all related to a new mobile web client that’s kind of exciting that we’re developing. It will live alongside the QT client. We actually just released the first pice of it in December. It’s an all Javascript/HTML5 framework called Enyo, which came out of the HP acquisition of Palm. It’s really slick. It’s still the same Postgres database on the back end. The QT client connects directly to the Postgres database. Instead of doing that, we have a middle tier now. The Node.js server manages the data source. We built a model layer with Backbone.js, and then Enyo on top of it for the front end. And the really cool thing is the two clients are completely interoperable, so you can have your accounting and manufacturing types back at the home office using the GUI client, and then the sales people out on the road with their iPads, or their Zunes or they Galaxys, or whatever. We looked for a very long time for the mobile equivalent of QT when it became clear that QT wasn’t going to do that any time soon. We really are very happy with Eyno. It’s fantastic. We’re big fans. And I think we’re going to end up, as was the case with QT, having one of the most substantial enterprise applications built with this tool set.

Rich: Thanks so much for your time. Congratulations again.

Ned: Thanks, Rich, appreciate it. And thanks for everything you guys do managing SourceForge. It’s an incredible resource and we’ve been happy participants for years, and we wish you all the best.

I recently spoke with Emmanuel Engelhart, one of the developers on the project.

Rich: Congratulations on winning the SourceForge Project of the Month for
February.

Emannuel: Thank you for hosting Kiwix development tools and promoting free software.

Rich: Start by telling us what Kiwix is. How would someone use this?

Emmanuel: Kiwix allows to read Wikipedia offline. In addition, using the highly efficient ZIM file format (http://www.openzim.org), Kiwix can read any HTML content offline. In order to enjoy Wikipedia offline, you need to download Kiwix and a ZIM file of Wikipedia (from the Kiwix web-site or directly from the Kiwix internal library).

Then you can surf in Wikipedia as if you were online. Kiwix provides almost everything you will need:

• Case and diacritics insensitive full text search engine
• Bookmarks & Notes
• ZIM based HTTP server
• PDF/HTML export
• Localized in more than 80 languages
• Search suggestions
• Tabs navigation
• Integrated content manager/downloader

Rich: How did you come to start this project?

Emmanuel: Why lock up Wikipedia to Wikipedia.org? The contents of Wikipedia should be available for everyone! Even without Internet access. This is why we have launched the Kiwix project.

Rich: Can you give us some examples of your project being used in the real world?

Emmanuel: Our users are spread all over the world: sailors on the oceans, poor students thirsty for knowledge, globetrotters almost living in planes, world’s citizens suffering from censorship or free minded prisoners. For all these people, Kiwix provides a simple and practical solution to ponder about the world.

Kiwix is used,for example, by the Wikimedia France Afripedia project, and also by
Wikimedia Kenya. And in India.

Spreading work is done by Wikimedia people and by third parties like NGOs. A lot of individuals also download Wikipedia offline once and then share it with their friends and relatives. We have had around 100.000 downloads in January.

Rich: Release more and more up-to-date content is our top priority. We continuously increase our ZIM file throughput by improving our ZIM generation toolchain. We will also soon start to release offline version of other Wikimedia projects.

To make Kiwix work on smartphones is our second priority. We hope to release a first version of kiwix-mobile for Android in April.

Regarding the far future, we will try to be one of the best open-source e-book readers. We think we have a cutting-edge file format with ZIM which is perfectly complementary with the actual EPUB standard. We will do our best to offer the best user experience with both in the future.

Rich: If someone wanted to get involved in your community, what could they do? Are you looking for developers? Translators? Users? Testers?

Emmanuel: Actually, the most important work to do, can be done by everyone: this is promoting and sharing Wikipedia offline with Kiwix. We have remarked that most of the people, although they would really need it, think it is impossible to have the whole Wikipedia with pictures on a USB stick. That’s why we need people to setup projects and spread it.

But, we have also plenty of work otherwise, for example:

• We would love to have a new javascript developer able to add the EPUB support using Monocle
• We always need new translators for the user interface
• We are working currently on a solution for plug computers called kiwix-plug; and there is a lot to do for people having GNU/Linux admin skills:
• We need a C++ expert to help us improving tools to manipulate ZIM file, we need especially a solution to make ZIM incremental updates.
• Of course need we testers, join us at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/kiwix-testing
• We need a bug master to manage all the tickets on the bug tracker

If you are interested, simply join us on Freenode IRC #kiwix channel.

The candidates are listed below. Go vote at http://twtpoll.com/ragr0e

• Cube 2: Sauerbraten (game engine & FPS)

  3D game engine (more powerful redesign of the Cube engine) and FPS game

• PostBooks ERP, accounting, CRM by xTuple

  Free open source ERP, accounting, CRM package for small to midsized businesses. Runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows (built with open source Qt framework). Business logic resides in PostgreSQL database. Rich API for connecting to third-party apps.

• SuperTuxKart

  SuperTuxKart is a kart racing game featuring Tux and friends. It is a fun-racer game, focusing on fun and ease of play.

• PokerTH

  PokerTH is a poker game written in C++/Qt. You can play the popular Texas Hold’em poker variant against up to nine computer-opponents or play internet games with people all over the world. This poker engine is available for Linux, Windows and Mac

• DVDStyler

  DVDStyler is a cross-platform free DVD authoring application for the creation of professional-looking DVDs. It allows not only burning of video files on DVD that can be played on standalone DVD player, but also creation of individually designed DVD menus

• GnuCash

  GnuCash is a personal and small-business finance manager with a check-book like register GUI to enter and track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. GnuCash is designed to be simple and easy to use but still based on formal accounting principles.

• simutrans

  Simutrans is a transport simulation game. Planes, ships, trains, trams, trucks, busses, or monorails are at your disposal. But factories have contracts and passengers will only travel to their own destinations. Many graphic sets (paks) are available.

• Skim PDF Reader and Note-taker for OS X

  Read and annotate scientific papers in PDF. Stop printing and start skimming. Skim requires Mac OSX 10.5 or higher.

• KDiff3

  KDiff3 is a graphical text difference analyzer for up to 3 input files, provides character-by-character analysis and a text merge tool with integrated editor. It can also compare and merge directories. Platform-independant.

• Open Broadcaster Software

  Open Broadcaster Software is free and open source software for the purposes of streaming live media content to the internet or to video files.

• Kiwix

  Wikipedia offline & more

• Waterfox

  Waterfox is a high performance browser based on the Mozilla Firefox source code. Made specifically for 64-Bit systems, Waterfox has one thing in mind: speed.

• WinDS PRO

  WinDS PRO (también abreviado como WinDS) es un Pack de Emuladores (colección de emuladores) para emular Game Boy, Super Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance y Nintendo DS; todas ellas Consolas portátiles creadas por Nintendo.

• wxWidgets

  wxWidgets is a free open source framework for development of cross platform GUI applications in C++ and many other languages via its different bindings (Python, Perl, Ruby, D, …).

• Redo Backup and Recovery

  Easy rescue system with GUI tools for full system backup, bare metal recovery, partition editing, recovering deleted files, data protection, web browsing, and more. Uses partclone (like Clonezilla) with a UI like Ghost or Acronis. Runs from CD/USB.

• Arch Bang

  ArchBang is a simple GNU/Linux distribution which provides you with a lightweight Arch Linux system combined with the OpenBox window manager. Suitable for both desktop and portable systems – It is fast, stable, and always up to date.

• SCons – a Software Construction tool

  SCons is a software construction tool (build tool, substitute for Make) implemented in Python, based on the winning design in the Software Carpentry build tool competition (in turn based on the Cons build tool).

• AjaXplorer

  Simply share documents and folders with your teams, Administrate your box with an Entreprise grade console (rights, groups, plug ins), Access documents with a Web Gui, Smartphones and tablet apps (iOS, Android), Sync folders on your computer (public beta, PC, Mac, Linux, Web, Tablets).

DOSBox emulates a full x86 pc with sound and DOS. Its main use is to run old DOS games on platforms which don’t have DOS (Windows 7 / Windows Vista / Windows 2000 / Windows XP / Linux / FreeBSD / Mac OS X)

We did the interview a little differently this time, as the developers wanted to do the interview on IRC.

Rich: First, congratulations on being awarded Project of the Month, and being the first project *ever* to have that honor twice.

Qbix: guess we must be doing something right then

Rich:

Harekiet: hehe nice, how long has that been going on now?

Rich: Since 2002.

Rich: Why is there still a demand for a DOS emulator these days?

Qbix: Good question. The charms of old games maybe

Harekiet: I’ve been kinda wondering about that as well, must mostly just be nostalgia with people that played dos games, can’t really see any kids playing them. And the occasional company that still runs their ancient stuff

Qbix: Although, some of the support requests are (based on their use of language) at least of younger ones.

Rich: And apparently some 35,000 other people every week, too.

Qbix: I would think that everybody who wanted to play a game, would have downloaded dosbox by now

Rich: I know that’s why I started using DOSBox, probably 10 years ago.

Rich: Take us back to the beginning. How did you get started doing this?

Harekiet: Well that would be my doing mostly since I was playing emulated console roms and I always wanted to see how dos games could look with some of the graphic enhancement filters they used in those. And that was at the time windows 2000 came along and dos support in windows was on the decline rapidly

Qbix: And we relied on VDMSound

Rich: Is there still more to do? Is development still active, or is it primarily end-user support these days?

Qbix: Well, development is slow, but still there.

Harekiet: And to really add new features you kinda get annoyed at some of the design choices made at the time and really think it might be better to just write a new emulator from scratch

Qbix: True, so mostly we’re just improving compatibility at the moment.

Qbix: Although, some long requested features will probably be in the next version. But the new emulator from scratch idea is very tempting, with the knowledge that we have now on how to do it better

Rich: Does that seem like a serious possibility now, or is that just an idea at this point?

Harekiet: Yeah, it’s mostly just an idea

Harekiet: If you can really bring up the energy for it, especially if you consider other emulators like qemu that provide better pc emulation but could be tweaked for better dos support, so many possibilities

Qbix: Yeah, starting anew will take a lot of resources and energy

Rich: Is there any interest in adding support for other platforms like Android? Does that even make any sense?

Qbix: It’s actually already there, but not by us, at least not at the moment

Harekiet: It’s been ported to ios and android by others

Rich: How large is the actual developer community? Is it just the two of you, or do you have other major contributors.

Qbix: we have more than just us

Harekiet: Well we used to have another active developer but he gave up on it and there’s some active people making patches

Harekiet: But I’d say Qbix is most active with it
Qbix: yeah there is h-a-l-9000 who is an official dev and a few people who make patches on regular basis

Rich: Have you ever had any legal challenges about what you’re doing?

Qbix: Well, we are used a lot by companies, and some of them don’t have an idea what the GPL means, just that dosbox is free and works.

Harekiet: And we’ve held off on the mt32 emulator since it would require the roland roms. Although i don’t really think it would cause that much trouble, thought scummvm had it added as well

Qbix: Yes, and by making it a seperate driver, more projects can benefit. The mt32 emu has made a lot of progress lately – starts to sound as good as my real mt32. But we try to stay clear from legal problems.

Rich: So, nobody suing you because of emulating their stuff?

Qbix: nope

Rich: Oh, good.

Qbix: All our legal stuff is trying to get companies to stick the GPL.

Rich: If someone wanted to get involved in your project, 1) what kind of skills would they need and 2) what would need to be done?

Harekiet: That’s always quite a troublesome question, you get mails of people asking that

Qbix: Everybody who wants to get involved basically first needs to debug games that don’t work and fix them

Harekiet: It’s not like dosbox has proper documentation and if they can figure out how dosbox works that’s probably a good start

Qbix: Yeah, that is the idea of them fixing games – getting familiar with dosbox and all the things it emulates. So many specs… all the hardware, BIOS, video BIOS, DOS, XMS, EMS, MSCDEX and lots of other standards

Harekiet: I’d rather want that they spend their time making some wine for windows properly, some weird early windows games that don’t run in xp anymore. Or windows 7 for that matter

Rich: Well, thanks so much for taking time to talk with me. And congratulations again.

Qbix: Thanks for hosting us all these years!

Harekiet: What’s the total bandwith wasted?

Rich: 24,256,320 downloads

Harekiet: 3.6*10^13 bytes my calc says assuming 1.4mb per download. 33 Tb? that seems a bit excessive

Rich: Thanks again for your time.

Harekiet: okay

Qbix: okay. Thanks!

• 0 A.D.

  0 A.D. (pronounced “zero ey-dee”) is a cross-platform real-time strategy (RTS) game of ancient warfare. It’s a historically-based war/economy game that allows players to relive or rewrite the history of ancient civilizations, each depicted at their peak of economic growth and military prowess.

• 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.

• XOOPS Web Application Platform

  XOOPS is one of world’s leading open source CMS and portal systems, written in PHP for the MySQL database. Its object orientation makes it an ideal tool for developing small or large community websites, intra company and corporate portals, weblogs and much more. Founded in 2001 by group of international software developers, XOOPS quickly become one of world’s leading Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS). Known and loved for its ease of use and countless powerful modules, XOOPS received numerous International Awards and Recognitions, including being the Top 5 finalist of the 2008, 2009, and 2010 CMS Awards by Packt Publishing. In January 2009 it received the 2008 China Open Source Software Contest Award and in October 2010 the “Best Technology Award” from Northeast Asia OSS Forum.

• HyperSQL Database Engine (HSQLDB)

  HSQLDB is a relational database engine written in Java, with a JDBC driver, conforming to ANSI SQL:2008. A small, fast, multithreaded engine and server with memory and disk tables, LOBs, transaction isolation, multiversion concurrency and ACID.

• Liferay Portal

  Liferay Portal is the world’s leading enterprise open source portal framework, offering integrated Web publishing and content management, an enterprise service bus and service-oriented architecture, and compatibility with all major IT infrastructure.

• Luminance HDR

  Luminance HDR is a complete suite for HDR imaging workflow. It provides a wide range of functionalities, both during the fusion and the tonemapping stage. Its graphical user interface, based on Qt4, runs on a multitude of platform, like Microsoft Windows (32 and 64 bit), Mac OS X 10.6 and above and several Linux distribution. Input images can be supplied in multiple formats, from JPEG to RAW files. In the same way, output can be saved in many different formats as well, from JPEG to TIFF (both 8 bit and 16 bit per channel), enabling all the power of your post processing tools.

• PeaZip

  PeaZip is a free Zip files utility, providing an unified, natively portable, cross-platform file and archive manager 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 files 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.

• Boost C++ Libraries

  Boost provides free portable peer-reviewed C++ libraries. The emphasis is on portable libraries which work well with the C++ Standard Library. See http://www.boost.org

• Scribus

  Scribus is an open-source program that brings professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows. Scribus supports professional features, such as CMYK color, spot color, separations, ICC color and robust commercial grade PDF.

It’s hard to believe that the end of 2012 is just a few days away. It’s been a great year for SourceForge. More about that later. Let’s start with this month:

JStock is the Project of the Month

JStock is a free stock market software for 26 countries. It provides stock watchlist, intraday stock price snapshot, stock indicator editor, stock indicator scanner and portfolio management. Free SMS/email alert supported.

Earlier this month we spoke with Yan Chen Cheok, the lead developer on this project. You can listen, or read, to find out more about JStock, at http://sourceforge.net/blog/potm-201212/. And, if you’re interested in the stock market, you can use JStock to help you become a smarter investor.

Please vote for the January Project of the Month. You’ll find the list of candidates, and a link to the vote, at http://sourceforge.net/blog/potm-vote-201301/. (You’ll need to be signed in to Twitter to vote, as a preventative measure against robo-voting.) Note: Vote is closed. Stay tuned for the January POTM announcement.

SourceForge is hiring

SourceForge, and our sister sites Slashdot and Freecode, are looking for some additions to our team. We’re looking for a Systems Programmer/Analyst, who will work on the team that oversees production and development systems, databases, systems integration, infrastructure, and networks for the Geeknet Media sites (Slashdot, SourceForge, Freecode) and associated services. You’ll find details of this position at http://bit.ly/SwenWE.

We’re also looking for a Senior Systems Administrator in the Chicago, IL area. You can find more details on that position at http://bit.ly/TMypNj.

Finally, we’re looking for a Front End Engineer for our Dexter, MI office. The details of that position are at http://bit.ly/TlCJBo.

If you’re interested in any of these positions, please click the red “Click Here to Apply” button on that site.

Games for The Holidays

If you’re a video game buff, new games for the holidays are always a winner. And if they’re free, that’s even better. Last year around this time, we did a blog entry (https://sourceforge.net/blog/games-for-the-holidays/) about free games, and since then we’ve done a number of features about the many games on SourceForge. We even tried to create a comprehensive list – https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/community-docs/SourceForge%20Games/ – which is still very much a work in process.

Platform Updates

Our team of engineers is constantly pushing out updates to the developer platform. However, we’ve done a rather poor job in the past of telling you what they’re up to, which is an injustice both to them and to you.

We’ve started a new series of blog posts, which you’ll find at http://sourceforge.net/blog/tag/updates/, where we’ll tell you what they’ve pushed out. We don’t cover everything, because much of it, although important, is behind-the-scenes stuff you won’t necessarily see. But we’ll cover the changes that we think will affect your daily use of the site, or which fix problems that many of you are likely to have seen.

We tend to operate in two-week sprints, but we also do minor pushes in between the major ones, so the frequency of these posts will vary from week to week. We hope that you find them helpful in keeping up with the progress of our platform.

Two recent additions include the 5-star ratings feature (http://sourceforge.net/blog/five-star-reviews-coming-to-your-project) and the addition of your Twitter handle to your project summary page (http://sourceforge.net/blog/your-projects-twitter-stream/). We think that both of these features will enhance your attachment to your community.

You can also see what we’ll be working on next (see the Milestone list on the left) and vote on tickets for upcoming milestones, at http://sourceforge.net/p/allura/tickets/.

Help Wanted

Every now and then, every project needs a little help. We have a forum at https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/helpwanted/ where you can post your needs, or your desire to help.

Here’s some projects that are looking for developers or designers to help them out.

Sqliteman is looking for someone to adopt the project. Sqliteman is a sqlite3 GUI frontend for developers and db users, written in C++ and QT4. If you’re interested, respond to the article at https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/helpwanted/programmers/thread/9ef2c155/

Aurora Game Manager is looking for a creative developer and a PC gamer to jump in on the effort. They describe more of what they’re looking for at https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/helpwanted/programmers/thread/3c17f54e/ Aurora is written using Java Swing.

XOOPS is looking for PHP developers, and for designers. XOOPS is a PHP CMS which was recently the SourceForge project of the month. You can follow up on the post at https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/helpwanted/programmers/thread/80250c4a/ if you’re interested.

The Vega Strike project is looking for artists to design 3D cockpit interiors. That request can be seen at https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/helpwanted/artists/thread/22208746/ and you can follow up on that post.

And, as importantly, there’s another forum for developers in search of a project. If your project is looking for new talent, have a look at the developer profiles posted at https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/helpwanted/developers/ and see if one of them is what you’re looking for.

Projects of the Month – a year in review

We’ve had some really great Projects of the Month this year, with very closely contested votes many months. At http://sourceforge.net/blog/2012-projects-of-the-month/ we review all of the featured projects for 2012, including the current project of the month, JStock.

Top Growth Projects

We’re always on the lookout for projects that might be doing interesting things, and a surge in downloads is one of many metrics that we look at to identify them. Here’s the projects that had the greatest growth in the last month.

Stellarium: A realistic, real-time 3D simulation of the night sky. http://sourceforge.net/projects/stellarium

Moodle: Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites. http://sourceforge.net/projects/moodle

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 http://sourceforge.net/projects/eclipsetutorial

Lazarus: Rapid applications development tool and libraries for FPC http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus

West Point Bridge Designer and Contest: A national virtual bridge engineering contest for kids of all ages. http://sourceforge.net/projects/wpbdc

Zenoss Core – Enterprise IT Monitoring: Zenoss Core is an enterprise network and systems management application written in Python. Zenoss provides an integrated product for monitoring availability, performance, events and configuration across layers and across platforms. http://sourceforge.net/projects/zenoss

MO Virtual Router: Virtual Wi-Fi For Windows 8 http://sourceforge.net/projects/movirtualrouter

Kiwix: Wikipedia offline & more http://sourceforge.net/projects/kiwix

AkelPad: A simple notepad-like text editor with many features. It is designed to be a small and fast. http://sourceforge.net/projects/akelpad

tuntaposx: Unix-style tun and tap virtual network interfaces for Mac OS X. http://sourceforge.net/projects/tuntaposx

PosteRazor – Make your own poster!: Want to print a poster? PosteRazor cuts an image file into pieces and you can print them on your printer and glue them together to a poster. Easy FLTK based user interface. Uses FreeImage for image loading. Creates PDFs as output. http://sourceforge.net/projects/posterazor

xplanner-plus: XPlanner+ is a web-based project planning and tracking tool. http://sourceforge.net/projects/xplanner-plus

ShellEd: ShellEd is a superb shell script editor for Eclipse. The benefits of this plugin are the integration of man page information for content assist/hover help and the ability to run your project’s shell scripts without leaving Eclipse. Check it out! http://sourceforge.net/projects/shelled

Sims3 Tools: Tools using the s3pi library and other related works – package editor (with simple objk, vpxy and language string editors and a DDS file tool), object cloner and sims3pack packer/unpacker. Runs on Windows, MacOS and Linux. http://sourceforge.net/projects/sims3tools

RapidMiner — Data Mining, ETL, OLAP, BI: No 1 in Business Analytics: Data Mining, Predictive Analytics, ETL, Reporting, Dashboards in One Tool. 1000+ methods: data mining, business intelligence, ETL, data mining, data analysis + Weka + R, forecasting, visualization, business intelligence. http://sourceforge.net/projects/rapidminer

Arch Bang: ArchBang is a simple GNU/Linux distribution which provides you with a lightweight Arch Linux system combined with the OpenBox window manager. Suitable for both desktop and portable systems – It is fast, stable, and always up to date. http://sourceforge.net/projects/archbang

NASA WorldWind: NASA World Wind is a graphically rich 3D virtual globe for use on desktop computers running Windows. It combines NASA imagery generated from satellites that have produced Blue Marble, Landsat 7, SRTM, MODIS and more. http://sourceforge.net/projects/nasa-exp

PhotoFilmStrip: PhotoFilmStrip creates movies out of your pictures in just 3 steps. First select your photos, customize the motion path and render the video. There are several output possibilities for VCD, SVCD, DVD up to FULL-HD. Creates animated slideshows. http://sourceforge.net/projects/photostoryx

py2exe: A distutils extension to create standalone windows programs from python scripts. http://sourceforge.net/projects/py2exe

In Closing …

As always, thanks for being part of the SourceForge community.

If you want more frequent updates than this newsletter, there’s several places where we make those updates. We’re on Twitter – http://twitter.com/sourceforge We’re on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/sourceforgenet We’re on Google+ – https://plus.google.com/u/1/102470258162390195749/posts And if you follow the opensource and software Reddits, http://www.reddit.com/r/opensource and http://www.reddit.com/r/software respectively, you’ll see the occasional post from us there, too.

And, of course, there’s our blog – http://sf.net/blog – where we post longer articles about our projects and our platform.

Keep coding.

The SourceForge Community Team
communityteam@sourceforge.net

• JANUARY – HyperSQL Database Engine (HSQLDB)

  HSQLDB is a relational database engine written in Java, with a JDBC driver, conforming to ANSI SQL:2008. A small, fast, multithreaded engine and server with memory and disk tables, LOBs, transaction isolation, multiversion concurrency and ACID.

• FEBRUARY – Boost C++ Libraries

  Boost provides free portable peer-reviewed C++ libraries. The emphasis is on portable libraries which work well with the C++ Standard Library. See http://www.boost.org

• MARCH – Scribus

  Scribus is an open-source program that brings professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows. Scribus supports professional features, such as CMYK color, spot color, separations, ICC color and robust commercial grade PDF.

• APRIL – 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.

• MAY – Luminance HDR

  Luminance HDR is a complete suite for HDR imaging workflow. It provides a wide range of functionalities, both during the fusion and the tonemapping stage. Its graphical user interface, based on Qt4, runs on a multitude of platform, like Microsoft Windows (32 and 64 bit), Mac OS X 10.6 and above and several Linux distribution. Input images can be supplied in multiple formats, from JPEG to RAW files. In the same way, output can be saved in many different formats as well, from JPEG to TIFF (both 8 bit and 16 bit per channel), enabling all the power of your post processing tools.

• JUNE – 0 A.D.

  0 A.D. (pronounced “zero ey-dee”) is a free, open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy (RTS) game of ancient warfare. It’s a historically-based war/economy game that allows players to relive or rewrite the history of six ancient Western civilizations, each depicted at their peak of economic growth and military prowess. The six factions are: The Hellenic States (aka The Greeks), the Roman Republic, The Celtic Tribes, the Persian Empire, the Iberian Tribes, and the Carthaginian Empire, each complete with unique artwork, technologies and civilisation bonuses.

• JULY – Liferay Portal

  Liferay Portal is the world’s leading enterprise open source portal framework, offering integrated Web publishing and content management, an enterprise service bus and service-oriented architecture, and compatibility with all major IT infrastructure.

• AUGUST – XOOPS Web Application Platform

  XOOPS is one of world’s leading open source CMS and portal systems, written in PHP for the MySQL database. Its object orientation makes it an ideal tool for developing small or large community websites, intra company and corporate portals, weblogs and much more. Founded in 2001 by group of international software developers, XOOPS quickly become one of world’s leading Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS). Known and loved for its ease of use and countless powerful modules, XOOPS received numerous International Awards and Recognitions, including being the Top 5 finalist of the 2008, 2009, and 2010 CMS Awards by Packt Publishing. In January 2009 it received the 2008 China Open Source Software Contest Award and in October 2010 the “Best Technology Award” from Northeast Asia OSS Forum.

• SEPTEMBER – PeaZip

  PeaZip is a free Zip files utility, providing an unified, natively portable, cross-platform file and archive manager 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 files 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.

• OCTOBER – ProjectLibre Project Management Software

  ProjectLibre is an open source alternative to Microsoft Project. We have a community site as well at http://www.projectlibre.org It has been downloaded in 194 countries the first month of release and was just voted Sourceforge’s “Project of the Month” ProjectLibre is compatible with Microsoft Project 2003, 2007 and 2010 files. You can simply open them on Linux, Mac OS or Windows. ProjectLibre has been rewritten and added key features: * Compatibility with Microsoft Project 2010 * User Interface improvement * Printing (does not allow printing) * Bug fixes The ProjectLibre team has been the key innovators in project management software dating to the mainframe/Dos/Windows markets and released the very first web-based project solution…..now also in development of a cloud/server replacement of Microsoft Project Server. If you download please donate so we can continue https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=PZRJ24PWQE5C8

• NOVEMBER – Rigs of Rods

  Rigs of Rods is a 3D simulator game where you can drive, fly and sail various vehicles using an accurate and unique soft-body physics engine.

• DECEMBER – JStock – Free Stock Market Software

  JStock is a free stock market software for 26 countries. It provides Stock watchlist, Intraday stock price snapshot, Stock indicator editor, Stock indicator scanner and Portfolio management. Free SMS/email alert supported.

• JXplorer – A Java Ldap Browser

  A free java ldap client with LDIF support, security (inc SSL, SASL & GSSAPI), translated into many languages (inc. Chinese), online help, user forms and many other features.

• Ajax File Manager – AjaxExplorer

  Need to handle your server files as easy as OS could? Then this is your stuff! Just upload the file to your server and unzip. Works on most browser.

• MegaMek

  MegaMek is a networked Java clone of BattleTech, a turn-based sci-fi boardgame for 2+ players. Fight using giant robots, tanks, and/or infantry on a hex-based map.

• TORCS – The Open Racing Car Simulator

  TORCS, The Open Racing Car Simulator is a highly portable multi platform car racing simulation. It is used as ordinary car racing game, as AI racing game and as research platform. It runs on Linux (x86, AMD64 and PPC), FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, MacOSX and Windows.

• DOSBox DOS Emulator

  DOSBox emulates a full x86 pc with sound and DOS. Its main use is to run old DOS games on platforms which don’t have DOS (Windows 7 / Windows Vista / Windows 2000 / Windows XP / Linux / FreeBSD / Mac OS X)

• Whonix

  Whonix (called TorBOX or aos in past) is an anonymous general purpose operating system based on Virtual Box, Debian GNU/Linux and Tor. By Whonix design, IP and DNS leaks are impossible. Not even malware with root rights can find out the user’s real IP/location. This is because Whonix consists of two (virtual) machines. One machine solely runs Tor and acts as a gateway, which we call Whonix-Gateway. The other machine, which we call Whonix-Workstation, is on a completely isolated network. Only connections through Tor are possible.

• sCoreForge Pathfinder Character Creator

  This is a Pathfinder Character Creation project that was started in March of 2011. Created by players, for players. Check out the Release Notes and Wiki for details on what’s what in the application.

• RecordEditor

  The RecordEditor is a Data File editor for Flat Files (delimited and fixed field position). It supports Unix / PC / Legacy (e.g. Mainframe) file formats, both Text and binary files.

• Manic Digger

  Manic Digger is a public domain 3d block-building game similar to Minecraft.

JStock is free stock market software. Its intent is to help you invest intelligently, and have fun while you’re doing it. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Yan Chen Cheok, who is the lead developer on this project. He told me some things about the history leading up to JStock becoming Open Source, and also a little bit about the project itself.

If the embedded audio player below doesn’t work for you, you can download the audio in mp3 or ogg formats.

You can subscribe to this, and future podcasts, in iTunes or elsewhere, at http://feeds.feedburner.com/sourceforge/podcasts, and it’s also listed in the iTunes store.

Rich: Congratulations on the project of the month!

Yan: Oh, thank you very much. I’m really happy about that.

Rich: Let’s talk a little bit about the project. Tell us what JStock does.

Yan: It’s a stock market software, where the object is to make your stock investment fun and easy. The reason we make this software is we want to make the stock investing activity an easy process even for the beginner to the stock market.

Rich: How many of you are involved in this project?

Yan Currently I’m the only main developer. But from time to time I will receive some code contributions from my users – they do some language translation for me, or they see some bug in the bug tracker and they send me code patches, and so on. From time to time I will receive some code patches from them, but most of the time I’m still the only developer fro this project.

Rich: You received a lot of votes for the project of the month, so I take it you have a lot of happy and content users. Where do you think most of your users are in the world?

Yan: Currently most of my users are in Malaysia, because I’m Malaysian myself. Because when I first created this project, I did a lot of marketing and promotion among my own investment community – I tried to talk to them, I tried to introduce this software to them. So this spread from mouth to mouth, so it ended up my users are pretty concentrated in a certain geographic location. I also tried to promote this overseas, like in the United States, but it didn’t work so well because I don’t know much of the investing community out there. I’m only familiar with the community around me.

Rich: Why did you choose to make the software open source?

Yan: I think this needs to go back a few years ago. When I started this project initially, I did not intend to make it Open Source. I started the project because at UCLA I got a contract software project from the stock industry. They wanted someone to create a customized software project for their stock education center. After I finished the software, they refused to pay for the project.

Rich: Oh no!

Yan: Yeah, that’s not a good thing. At first I was quite upset with that because I spent so much effort and time into finishing the project, and I’m not getting paid. Then I was thinking, instead of throwing away the source code, or just letting this software die, why don’t I open source it, and make it grow. If I look back in my code committing history, I see … I think that happened around 2007, August. So I think that’s the time when it got started. It began from a failed software contract project, and I grew it to become an Open Source project with the help of SourceForge.

Rich: That’s a good story. It could have gone much worse.

Yan: I think it’s a good thing, though. If I sold it to them, maybe I’d only get a few hundred users, but now I made it Open Source, and published it on SourceForge, the world-wide users also can enjoy this software. It’s quite a satisfaction for this.

Rich: Again, thank you very much for speaking with me, and congratulations on winning project of the month.

Yan: Oh, thanks.

Rich: If people want to get involved in your project, should they get in touch with you, or should they talk on the forums, or what?

Yan: In our project website, within the wiki, I describe how the code contribution process should go on. So basically they just need to go through any feature request or bug report in the tracker, they can pick up the ticket, then email me a code patch. So, if they do that process several times, then I will give them commit rights. But so far most of the time I only receive only one-time contributions from the contributors, so I still am not able to make them a long-time committer for the project.

Rich: Thank you very much. I wish the best on your project!

Subject: Rigs of Rods is Project of the Month; Help Wanted; SourceForge is hiring; More …

Thanks for being part of the SourceForge community!

Rigs of Rods is Project of the Month

After four months of thoroughly practical POTMs, it’s time for something fun. November’s Project of the Month is Rigs of Rods. Rigs of Rods is a softbody physics simulator. To physicists, that means that it simulates the way that most objects, like, say, cars and trucks, are constructed of mass points, rather than being a single solid block. To the rest of us, that means that Rigs of Rods is a cool game where you can watch what happens when you crash those cars and trucks into things.

RoR has a huge user community around it (http://www.rigsofrods.com/) – people who are passionate about creating models of their favorite vehicles – including planes, boats, and trains, as well as cars and trucks. And because physics doesn’t lie, these vehicles behave just as they would in the real world. You can see some great videos of this on YouTube. Then, go download RoR and play with it yourself.

Looking forward, we have some great candidates on the ballot for the December Project of the Month. Please have a look at them, and go vote!

Help Wanted

The response to our “Help Wanted” newsletter sections, and blog posts has been overwhelming, with every one receiving responses from interested developers, as well as further email from other projects wanting to be added to the list.

We’re going to keep doing these things, but we recognize that the approach doesn’t scale to quite the level we need it to. So we’ve launched a Help Wanted forum where projects can look for developers, and developers can look for projects. You can still email us directly, if you prefer, but posting directly to that forum will let you engage with the conversation, and receive notifications when someone has responded.

SourceForge is Hiring

As you may remember, SourceForge recently acquired Dice. (They see it the other way around. It’s all a matter of perspective.) This month we’re using the Dice website to look for a new member of our team here at SourceForge.
We’re looking for a Systems Programmer/Analyst to work on the Slashdot, SourceForge, and Freecode sites. You can read all the details at Dice.com.

Upgrade to the new SourceForge

As we’ve mentioned in other mailings, we’re working towards retiring the old SourceForge platform, so that we’re not maintaining two platforms, and can move forward faster. In order to do this, we’re trying to get everyone migrated to the new platform this year.

If you’d like to move to the new platform on your own time, time’s running out. You can look through some of the new functionality at https://sourceforge.net/create/#feature-holder You can upgrade your project by clicking the “Upgrade” button at http://sourceforge.net/p/upgrade. If you’re concerned about the upgrade process, or about the functionality of the new platform, please don’t hesitate to contact us (communityteam@sourceforge.net) to discuss your concerns.

Top Twenty Growth

Every month we highlight projects that have seen substantial growth in the last month, as measured by downloads. This month, there’s a lot of familiar names and projects that have been with us a long time.

Ares Galaxy: Filesharing-Bittorrent p2p client http://sourceforge.net/projects/aresgalaxy

Azureus / Vuze: Vuze (formerly Azureus) is a P2P file sharing client using the bittorrent protocol. Search and download torrent files. Play, convert and transcode videos and music for playing on many devices such as PSP, TiVo, XBox, PS3, iTunes (iPhone, iPod, Apple TV). http://sourceforge.net/projects/azureus

DeSmuME: DeSmuME is a Nintendo DS emulator. http://sourceforge.net/projects/desmume

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

KompoZer: KompoZer is a wysiwyg HTML editor using the Mozilla Composer codebase. As Nvu’s development stopped in 2005, KompoZer fixes many bugs and adds a few useful features. http://sourceforge.net/projects/kompozer

SABnzbdPlus: The automatic usenet download tool http://sourceforge.net/projects/sabnzbdplus

FreeNAS: FreeNAS is an Open Source Storage Platform and supports sharing across Windows, Apple, and UNIX-like systems. It includes ZFS (high storage capacities and integrates file systems and volume management into a single piece of software) http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas

UltraDefrag: Increase your system performance with this simple to use tool http://sourceforge.net/projects/ultradefrag

4k Download: Free video and audio download from YouTube and other services http://sourceforge.net/projects/four-k-download

Rigs of Rods: softbody physics simulation http://sourceforge.net/projects/rigsofrods

Orwell Dev-C++: A portable C/C++/C++11 IDE http://sourceforge.net/projects/orwelldevcpp

StarUML: StarUML is an open source project to develop fast, flexible, extensible, featureful, and freely-available UML/MDA platform running on Win32 platform. The goal is a compelling replacement of commercial UML tools such as RationalRose, Together and so on. http://sourceforge.net/projects/staruml

LOIC: Low Orbit Ion Cannon. The project just keeps and maintenances (bug fixing) the code written by the original author – Praetox, but is not associated or related with it. http://sourceforge.net/projects/loic

cm10i9100vsync: Yet another android ROM distribution. http://sourceforge.net/projects/cm10i9100vsync

PNotes: PNotes is light-weight, flexible, skinnable manager of virtual notes on your desktop. It supports multiple languages, individual note’s settings, transparency and scheduling. Absolutely portable as well – no traces in registry. http://sourceforge.net/projects/pnotes

eMule Plus: eMule Plus is an evolution of the original eMule project, created to improve its abilities and features, in both work efficiency and user interface. http://sourceforge.net/projects/emuleplus

DreaMule: It´s a ed2k file sharing client, done for easy of use and speed. http://sourceforge.net/projects/pootzmod

SugarCRM – commercial open source CRM: Affordable and easy to use customer relationship management http://sourceforge.net/projects/sugarcrm

PyQt: The GPL licensed Python bindings for the Qt application framework http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyqt

pseint: A tool for learning programming basis with a simple spanish pseudocode http://sourceforge.net/projects/pseint

Network Spoofer: Change websites on a Wifi network http://sourceforge.net/projects/netspoof

In Closing

As always, thanks for being part of the SourceForge community.

If you want more frequent updates than this newsletter, there’s several places where we make those updates. We’re on Twitter. We’re on Facebook. We’re on Google+. And if you follow the opensource and software Reddits, http://www.reddit.com/r/opensource and http://www.reddit.com/r/software respectively, you’ll see the occasional post from us there, too.

And, of course, there’s our blog – http://sf.net/blog – where we post longer articles about our projects and our platform.

Keep coding.

The SourceForge Community Team
communityteam@sourceforge.net