For those of you who don’t get the monthly newsletter, here’s what we sent out this week:
SUBJECT: ProjectLibre is Project of the Month; Looking for Developers; Games; and more …
Thanks for being part of the SourceForge Community!
ProjectLibre is Project of the Month
ProjectLibre is the October 2012 Project of the Month. ProjectLibre is an Open Source alternative to Microsoft Project. It’s a fairly new project, but it’s derived from a much older one – OpenProj – that has been dormant for several years. It’s off to a very strong start, having been downloaded in more than 175 countries in its first month. And they’ve put together a strong community site at http://projectlibre.org/ where there are thousands of registered users from around the world.
You can read, or listen to, our interview with ProjectLibre at http://sourceforge.net/blog/potm-201210/
Also, don’t forget to vote for November’s Project of the Month at http://sourceforge.net/blog/potm-vote-201211/ At the moment, the vote appears a little one-sided (Go Rigs of Rods!) and the other projects have yet to really show themselves. Let’s make this more of a race in the last week of voting.
Looking for Developers
The following projects are just a small selection of those that are looking for fresh input on their teams. Keep watching the blog, Facebook, and Twitter, for other projects that might need your help.
Privateer Gemini Gold is a remake of the classic space simulation adventure Privateer that was part of the Wing Commander games series. It brings back the magic of the Gemini Sector with a modern game engine and high resolution graphics. As such, it’s natural that after achieving faithful reproduction, the game approaches a “finished” state. It’s not there, though, and while it depends on Vega Strike’s engine, there have been lots of improvements on that engine since the last release, and Gold is thus in need of adaptation to this new engine. Volunteers to help on that task would be very welcome. New engine features range from movie support (the game is missing some cutscenes present in the original game) to improved shaders and graphics overall. So help on 3D models and other assets could also be useful. If you’re interested in playing along, go to the project tracker at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=78387&atid=553118 and dive in.
SciDAVis is a user-friendly data analysis and visualization program for high-quality plotting of scientific data. It’s an intuitive, easy-to-use graphical user interface with powerful features such as Python scriptability. Unfortunately, the project admin is no longer interested in the project, and is looking for someone to take over maintenance of the project. You should have a strong background in scientific calculation, C++, Python, and Qt. Get in touch with us (communityteam@sourceforge.net) and we’ll make the necessary introductions.
Exult is a game engine for running Ultima7 on modern operating systems, plus a map-editor and other tools for creating your own mods and games. Dominik Reichardt, the lead developer, says: “We do actually plan to release a new version soon since we hope that we recently squished a really bad, show stopping bug that is hard to reproduce. Once we can confirm it is really fixed a new version will be on its way. But, after 14 years of development, work on Exult has really slowed down. So new developers are really welcome to join and could possibly rejuvenate the project. We need help in porting Exult to SDL 2.0 and to new platforms like iOS and Android, or just plain fixing some of the bugs are areas that could interest new developers. Any developers wanting to join can contact us via the mailing list at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/exult-general or on our irc channel #exult on irc.freenode.net.
We also have been posting ‘Help Wanted’ announcements on our blog, at http://sourceforge.net/blog/category/help-wanted/ and the response has been very encouraging, with several projects resuming development after years of inactivity. If your project is looking for fresh blood, please let us know (communityteam@sourceforge.net) and we’ll try to connect the right people with your project.
Games
We were looking through the Wikipedia list of Open Source games a few days ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_games) and noticed that a lot of them are on SourceForge. In fact, of the 114 games listed, 58 are on SourceForge. Apparently SourceForge is the place to be, if you’re developing an Open Source game.
But we also noticed that there were a lot missing. In just a few minutes of poking around, we’d found about 40 other games, game engines, and other game related projects. Rather than brave the Wikipedia editorial process, we made our own list: https://sourceforge.net/p/forge/community-docs/SourceForge%20Games/ (We probably missed some – please let us know if we missed yours.)
We love our Open Source game communities. They seem to have some of the most passionate, most quality-conscious communities around. They care about details. They care about internal consistency and historical accuracy. And, of course, they’re having fun.
Top Growth Projects
Each month we mention the projects that have been growing the fastest. These are the projects to watch, and while many of them are ones we’ve seen before, there’s always a few rising stars in the list – projects that we may not have noticed before. So, here they are.
ClamWin Free Antivirus: Looking for free Open Source Antivirus for Windows? Download ClamWin Free Antivirus and get free virus scanning and free virus definition updates. Free Antivirus software for Windows, using the well-respected ClamAV scanning engine. Includes virus scanner, scheduler, virus database updates, context menu integration to MS Windows Explorer and Add-in to MS Outlook. Also features easy setup program. http://sourceforge.net/projects/clamwin
Orwell Dev-C++: A portable C/C++/C++11 IDE http://sourceforge.net/projects/orwelldevcpp
WinSCP: WinSCP is a SFTP client and FTP client for Windows. Its main function is the secure file transfer between a local and a remote computer. It uses Secure Shell (SSH) and supports, in addition to Secure FTP, also legacy SCP protocol. http://sourceforge.net/projects/winscp
KompoZer: KompoZer is a wysiwyg HTML editor using the Mozilla Composer codebase. As Nvu’s development has been stopped in 2005, KompoZer fixes many bugs and adds a few useful features. http://sourceforge.net/projects/kompozer
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. http://sourceforge.net/projects/qbittorrent
Source Code Pro: A set of monospaced OpenType fonts designed for coding environments http://sourceforge.net/projects/sourcecodepro.adobe
Whited00r: A custom iOS firmware for older devices. http://sourceforge.net/projects/whited00r
Cool Reader: XML/CSS based E-Book reader for desktops and handheld devices. Supports most popular ebook formats. http://sourceforge.net/projects/crengine
SQuirreL SQL Client: SQuirreL SQL Client is a graphical SQL client written in Java that will allow you to view the structure of a JDBC compliant database, browse the data in tables, issue SQL commands etc. http://sourceforge.net/projects/squirrel-sql
Free Pascal Compiler: Free 32/64-bit multi-platform Pascal and Object Pascal compiler http://sourceforge.net/projects/freepascal
Chicken: Chicken is a VNC client for Mac OS X. A VNC client allows remote access to another computer over the network. http://sourceforge.net/projects/chicken
DavMail POP/IMAP/SMTP/Caldav to Exchange: Ever wanted to get rid of Outlook ? DavMail is a POP/IMAP/SMTP/Caldav/Carddav/LDAP gateway allowing users to use any mail client with Exchange, even from the internet through Outlook Web Access on any platform, tested on MacOSX, Linux and Windows http://sourceforge.net/projects/davmail
gnuplot: Famous scientific plotting package. http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuplot
Bodhi Linux: Bodhi is a minimalistic, enlightened, Linux desktop. http://sourceforge.net/projects/bodhilinux
wxWidgets: Cross-platform C++ GUI Framework http://sourceforge.net/projects/wxwindows
YouTube Downloader: Files Downloader is a free powerful utility that will help you to download your favorite videos from youtube. The application is platform-independent and runs in Windows, Linux, and MacOS. http://sourceforge.net/projects/ytd
D-Fend Reloaded: D-Fend Reloaded is a graphical environment for DOSBox. D-Fend Reloaded is a successor of the discontinued D-Fend. Both environments look alike and D-Fend Reloaded contains all features of D-Fend. Even the D-Fend config files can be used. http://sourceforge.net/projects/dfendreloaded
xVideoServiceThief: xVideoServiceThief is a tool for downloading your favourite video clips from a lot of video websites. xVideoServiceThief also provide you the ability to convert each video in most popular formats: AVI, MPEG1, MPEG2, WMV, MP4, 3GP, MP3 file formats. http://sourceforge.net/projects/xviservicethief
Source Sans Pro: A set of OpenType fonts designed for user interfaces http://sourceforge.net/projects/sourcesans.adobe
Subsonic: Subsonic is a web-based media streamer, providing ubiquitous access to your music and video collection. More than 20 apps are available for Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Roku, Chumby, Sonos etc. Supports virtually all media formats, converting files on the fly. Also includes a Podcast receiver and jukebox feature allowing you to control what’s playing on your computer from your mobile phone. http://sourceforge.net/projects/subsonic
In Closing
As always, thanks for being part of the SourceForge community.
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
We’re also on Facebook, at https://www.facebook.com/sourceforgenet , where we try to give the longer-than-140-character view of our projects. If your project is on Facebook, please let us know. We’re trying to build up the list of projects that we’re following, in our ongoing attempt to be more informed about the news from our communities.
And, of course, there’s our blog – http://sf.net/blog – where we post longer articles about our projects and our service.
Keep coding.
The SourceForge Community Team
communityteam@sourceforge.net