• 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

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.

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!

Rich: October’s project of the month is ProjectLibre, an Open Source alternative to Microsoft Project. Now, as it happens, I spoke with Marc O’Brien of the ProjectLibre project just a few weeks ago. So, in this conversation we focused more on the community aspects of the project, rather than on the technical and functional aspects. Here’s my conversation with Marc.

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: Hi, Marc. Congratulations for being project of the month. I also see you had a record download day yesterday.

Marc I noticed that. I gotta tell you, that is highly appreciated not just by us, but I got so much feedback from the community. People were really pleased, because we really want to focus this and make sure that we can get the progress with it, and part of that’s the user feedback. And so more people using it and getting us feedback the better. So that was excellent. One of the other interesting things – and you and I talked about it last time – I’ve got a personal interest in the geographic dispersion of it. And I’ve been tracking not just the downloads, but the countries. We were stuck on 136 countries for about a week, and with that change, we bumped up to, I think 140 or 141.

Rich: 142. 142 countries.

Marc I need to refresh my screen. Since this morning, two more countries have … that speaks volumes right there. Because I checked first thing this morning, and it was at 140. You’re right. 142.

Rich: This is cool.

Marc It really is. And you and I talked about Africa last time. I do think that Open Source software in general, but this in particular, can have a disproportionate benefit, not numbers-wise, but impact-wise, all over the world. That’s a really cool thing.

Rich: Last time we talked specifically about your project and its history. And that wasn’t so very long ago. Let’s talk a little bit about why you think that this project is important in those countries.

Marc There’s been a lot of progress made in Open Source software for productivity applications and business applications. And you can look no farther than just OpenOffice and LibreOffice, and see the impact that they have will millions and millions of users, and really a very nice alternative to the Office suite from Microsoft. You can look at Google as far as the cloud. Office includes Microsoft Project. Obviously, they have a dominant market share in the project management category. And part of the Office umbrella includes Project. And it turns out that about 7% of all desktops not only include your normal Office suite, but also Microsoft Project. In the ecosystem of Open Source software, it’s very difficult to make that jump as a business, be it a large business or a small business, over to Open Source software if you don’t have complementary packages across the board. You could look at it at first blush and say, 7% is not a big number, but even in a small/medium business, with downwards of 100 employees, you’re still talking about seven desktops that need an alternative in the Open Source space. ProjectLibre is that alternative, so that you can actually open up Microsoft Project files, be it on Linux, Mac, or Windows, and you’ve got an alternative. So that the impact of ProjectLibre is pretty wide spread, because it will allow companies to really deploy Open Source applications on the desktop such as OpenOffice or LibreOffice.

Rich: So far as the third world goes, there’s an enormous amount of illegal software use. Your project and ones like it also fill a role there. Can you talk a bit about that?

Marc I really feel passionately about this because it is a moral dilemma, around the world, whether you manage your project on a spreadsheet or whether you pay $1000 a copy for Microsoft Project or other proprietary vendors. Sometimes we look in the prism of the North American economy, and we see piracy here. Piracy around the world is a moral dilemma – they’re really figuring out whether they can effectively manage projects on a spreadsheet or whether they need to pirate, because the money’s not there. ProjectLibre gives them a free alternative that not only can manage the projects at the same level of functionality and features but also lets them potentially save it out if they have to interact with someone with the proprietary software so that you can actually exchange schedules. I think that the impact on this world-wide will be very significant, because projects are occurring all over the world – Africa, Asia, India, South America – and we can see that by the usage statistics as well.

Rich: And of course that’s not merely in technology businesses. Everyone has projects they have to manage.

Marc That’s exactly right. Project management itself as a discipline is a very interesting discipline. People get their PhDs now, and their Masters degrees, in the project management discipline. Architecture, engineering, and construction is a big segment. Pharmaceuticals is a big segment. Projects occur across the board and it’s very horizontal as far as the applicability.

Marc The community, as well – we are thrilled with the community. The ProjectLibre community at ProjectLibre.org is approaching 1000 people. And I had high expectations for the community involvement, but obviously people are voluntarily joining, and those numbers for one month are just tremendous for us. And we’re trying to manage the community effectively, and we’ll continue to refine how we do that. It’s really been wonderful to see almost 1000 people join the community in the first month.

Rich: I assume that these are primarily users of the software. Are you also seeing code contributions yet?

Marc No, we’re not. We’re seeing contributions from the community. The contributions are primarily on the documentation side, as well as the translations side. The code contributions right now has really been smaller for the team, and I need to give a shout out to the co-founder, Laurent Chretienneau, who is over in France, and is just doing an amazing job with the group. But the code contributions right now are occurring internally, because it’s very complex, with a lot of the bugs being fixed. But the community has really reached out in regards to translations, be it Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, French, Italian … I could keep going. But it’s really been great to get those kind of contributions. But primarily the community is doing a lot of bug testing for us. WIth 1000 people, and growing rapidly, it’s going to be really beneficial for the entire project.

You and I have been focusing on the fact that it’s in 142 countries. But in the United States, about 22% of the downloads are from the United States, and we’re seeing community members from Fortune 500 companies and they’re readily endorsing us. And so we’re getting great feedback. I unfortunately don’t have permission yet to use names, but suffice it to say it’s actually Fortune 10 level companies that are readily adopting it. It really is cool. In one particular instance, are doing so not just domestically, but also with some of their international operations. For them, they’re able to do this effectively because of the interoperability with existing proprietary tools, a.k.a. Microsoft Project. So that as they’re rolling this out, it can be augmenting what they currently have deployed and send the files back and forth. In short order, I want to get a case study out there so that this can really be much more publicized with specific information. But I think that’s one of the things that’s really been gratifying in addition to the global usage, but also the fact that it’s spanning from small/medium enterprises up to, like I said, a Fortune 10. So that’s really great.

Rich: Marc, thank you very much for talking with me again. And I look forward to seeing your download numbers continue to grow.

Marc Rich, I really appreciate it. Thanks for all the support, and it was a pleasure speaking with you again as well. Thanks.

• ImperiumAO

  ImperiumAO is a popular FREE Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Play Game (MMORPG) developed using BaronSoft’s ORE engine and currently being ported to a brand new SDL-C++ programmed engine. The game is set up on a huge medieval fantasy world and it has multiple worldwide located servers with currently more than 100.000 active players around the globe.

• FlightGear Mac OS X

  FlightGear Mac OS X is a Mac version of FlightGear, a multi-platform open-source flight simulator that provides very realistic flight experience on your computer. By installing a package you can fly around the world in the comfort of your own home.

• Fink

  Fink brings the full world of Unix Open Source software to Darwin and Mac OS X. Packages are downloaded and built automatically and installed into a tree managed by dpkg, all with full dependency tracking.

• JasperReports Server

  JasperReports Server is a powerful, yet flexible and lightweight reporting server. Generate, organize, secure, and deliver interactive reports and dashboards to users with a web based BI Platform.

• 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.

• Hugin

  Panorama stitching and more. A powerful software package for creation and processing of panoramic images.

• ProjectLibre Project Management Software

  ProjectLibre project management software, Formerly known as OpenProj, is a full replacement for Microsoft Project, on both the desktop, and on the server side.

• TYPO3 Content Management Framework

  TYPO3 is an enterprise class Web CMS written in PHP/MySQL. It’s designed to be extended with custom written backend modules and frontend libraries for special functionality.
  It has very powerful integration of image manipulation.

Rich: Congratulations on being the Project of the Month! Tell us about PeaZip, and what it does.

Giorgio: Thank you, I’m truly honoured by this wonderful opportunity to talk about PeaZip project, and to thank all people that have contributed in so many ways to its success.

PeaZip is a file and archive manager, a sort of Swiss-army knife software for handling data: create, extract, and convert archive files, encrypt and decrypt (a password manager is featured), securely delete files, calculate a wide range of checksum and hashes, and find duplicate files.

Basically, any feature useful to store, backup, and share files is (or should be) in the scope of this project, but at the same time it also aims to keep a friendly user interface where functionalities can be easily discovered without complicating the most basic and common usage patterns.

A distinctive trait of PeaZip is its compression/extraction interface, designed to make it extremely simple to check (and update) items set for compression and extraction, as it integrates a full featured file manager. Also, the application aims to bridge the gap between the ease of use of GUI applications and the power and flexibility of the console: tasks created in the GUI can be saved as batch scripts, in order to automate backup operations, for fine tuning, or for learning purpose.

Rich: What is the history of PeaZip? What inspired you to start the project?

Giorgio: The first important source of inspiration was the discovery of Lazarus/FreePascal IDE, an excellent choice for deploying cross-platform applications, using native GUI elements, and almost self contained in terms of dependencies – excellent for creating natively portable software packages, a quality I appreciate very much.

Then, in 2006, using the excellent Wolfgang Ehrhardt’s Pascal/Delphi crypto library, I started designing PEA (that stands for “pack, encrypt, authenticate”), a format for archiving files providing compression and authenticated encryption. PeaZip was initially meant just as the frontend for PEA format creation and extraction, in my mind a secondary goal for the project, but soon user’s feedback encouraged me in focusing on deploying general purpose GUI fronted, supporting an increasing number of file formats through Open Source technologies like 7-Zip/p7zip, FreeARC, PAQ family compressors, etc…

Rich: PeaZip is able to create 12 different compression types, and extract over 150 types. Are there patent restrictions on any of the file types that you’re able to create? Have legal matters played any role in the file types that you’re able to work with?

Giorgio: Definitely yes: every time it is possible I prefer to focus the development on supporting file formats not encumbered by patent restrictions, or even better ones whose file format specifications and reference implementation are released under Open Source licenses.

The full disclosure of the format specification and of the source code is in my opinion the best way to defend user’s right against possible vendor lock-in abuses, and against possible design or implementation flaws passing undetected due to the difficulties in conducing proper amount of independent analysis if the format is poorly documented or the source code is not accessible.

Rich: For years, you’ve had an incredibly active release schedule, pushing out new releases sometimes every month. Does the compression landscape change that frequently?

Giorgio: Yes, those years had seen an incredible amount of advancements in compression field, and most prominent applications like WinZip, WinRar and 7-Zip are progressing quickly: encryption is becoming a fundamental component in designing archive formats, filesystems and communication protocols; multicore CPU become mainstream and efficiently using parallelism is a key factor for performances; new operating systems were released and had to be tested.

Following “Release early, release often” paradigm in last years I tried to keep up with updates of Open Source technologies employed in the project, improve the usability of the GUI frontend, and improve the system integration of the software.

Providing frequent updates and collecting as frequently the feedback from users I attempted to guide the growth of the project, balancing the need of introducing new features and the need of keeping the application familiar and easy to use both for newer and older users.

Rich: Where is the project going in the future? What is there still to do?

Giorgio: There is a lot to do! There’s plenty of feature requests, sometimes contrasting: improve UTF8 support and system menu integration on Windows; improve support for ReactOS; compile natively for 64 bit without relying on ia32-libs on Linux; supporting latest releases of Qt and GTK widget toolkits… Lazarus project has just reached the 1.0RC milestone, and I’m excited to experiment the improvements it will bring for developers. I can anticipate next release PeaZip will support Matt Mahoney’s ZPAQ 4.04, and that from the UI’s point of view following updates will be evolutionary, refining the way the application behaves, how relevant information is displayed to users, and optimizing system resource usage.

Rich: How can people get involved in your community?

Giorgio: PeaZip project is active on SourceForge and Google Code, and in social media as Twitter, Facebook and Google+. In this way I try to reach many different types of users, each bringing a different user’s experience, different goals and different ways to use the application. I hope to be able to provide for each user the most comfortable mean to participate to the project in any possible way, with code, feedback (suggestions, feature request, bug reports), and (what is sometimes underestimated) with translations, that is a fundamental aspect for making the project accessible to a wider, non native English speaking, audience.

A big thank to all people that have contributed to PeaZip project’s growth: the teams of the fundamental “building blocks” (Lazarus, 7-Zip, FreeARC, Wolfgang Ehrhardt, Matt Mahoney and others…) for releasing those great pieces of software as Open Source, to translators that took time to localize PeaZip and keep it up to date release after release, to all people that tested the software and provided invaluable feedback over those 6 years!

XOOPS is the August project of the month. Now it’s time to start voting for September’s POTM. The candidates are listed below, in no particular order.

Vote at TwtPoll.

• PeaZip

  PeaZip is a free cross-platform file and archive manager utility that provides an unified portable GUI for many Open Source technologies like 7-Zip, FreeArc, PAQ, UPX. Create and extract 150+ archive types: ACE, ARJ, CAB, DMG, ISO, LHA, RAR, UDF, ZIPX and more

• Coppermine Photo Gallery

  Coppermine is an easily set-up, fast, feature-rich photo gallery script with mySQL database, user management, private galleries, automatic thumbnail creation, ecard feature and a template system for easy customization to match the rest of a site.

• 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.

• Orwell Dev-C++

  A maintained verison of Dev-C++ which features an updated MinGW compiler and updated code.

• OpenCPN

  OpenCPN: A concise ChartPlotter/Navigator. A cross-platform ship-borne GUI application supporting * GPS/GPDS Postition Input * BSB Raster Chart Display * S57 Vector ENChart Display * AIS Input Decoding * Waypoint Autopilot Navigation

• SquirrelMail

  SquirrelMail is a PHP-based Web email client. It includes built-in pure PHP support for IMAP and SMTP, and renders all pages in pure HTML 4.0 for maximum compatibility across browsers. It has strong MIME support and a flexible plugin system.

• Storybook

  Are you a novelist, a writer or an author? Storybook is a scene-based software for all creative writers that helps to organize your story. Storybook assists you in structuring your book.

• Adium

  Adium is an open source, multi-protocol instant messaging application for Mac OS X.

• 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.

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 and 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 being project of the month!

[See former Projects of the Month.]

Mark: Thank you. That certainly comes from everybody who’s involved with XOOPS. It’s a credit to everybody who’s involved with XOOPS.

Michael: It’s definitely a great honor for our community and we are extremely happy about this award.

Rich: For those that are not familiar with your project, can you give us a brief summary of what XOOPS does?

Mark: XOOPS is a content management system. It’s designed to help people get quickly up and running with lots of good common functionality. So, like some of the other content management systems out there that others may know, it’s a very mature, very secure, easy to use system. You can install the basic content management system that has all the permissioning, all the plugins and hooks for other functional modules to be added in. Then you can add in page content management, you can add in forums, you can add in frequently asked questions modules, social networking modules … whatever type of functionality that you really need for a website that’s pretty common out there, calendaring, etc, it exists in XOOPS. Somebody has built at least one module, typically we have several modules to choose from, each with different types of functionality and you can plug those in. We also have module packs, we have our first one up, we’re working to build several other to make it even easier to just pull down a pack together and download those and get them installed.

Rich: Looking at the download statistics from your project, it’s obvious that you have a very international following. Why do you think that is?

Michael: XOOPS has been an international project from the very beginning, when it was started 10 years ago. The first developers were from Japan, Germany, China, USA, and several other countries. So we’ve made a key requirement that it will be translated into all major languages, and to make it easy to customize it for local requirements. We are very popular in Japan, Taiwan, Brazil, France, and many other countries.

This is also reflected in our development community, where we have our developers coming from different countries, such as France, Libya, Japan, China, Portugal, Brazil, Australia, Russia, and many others. The beauty of a project such as XOOPS is that it allows people join together, regardless of their country of origin, gender, race, religion, or politics, and focus on something they enjoy, which is developing XOOPS.

Rich: When evaluating a CMS, of course we want to see what other sites are using it. Can you tell us a few of your recent success stories with XOOPS?

Michael: Yes, XOOPS has several installations that we can be very proud of. The most recent success story is from Libya, where the new government was looking for an Open Source solution, and after some tough testing of several CMS projects, they’ve decided for XOOPS. As a result the new Ministry of Defense and the National Election Commission are both running on XOOPS, and we hope that more of the government institutions in Lybia will follow.

Another success story is State of Parana in Brazil, where all government Websites (and they have over 300 of them), are running on XOOPS. Also the Brazilian CIA, the Brazilian Intelligence Agency is running on XOOPS.

We have also a whole county in Taiwan running their school system on XOOPS.

Of course, there are many others less visible users, but not less happy with XOOPS.

Rich: What’s happened recently? Have you had some important release recently that you want to tell us about?

Mark: 2.5.5 came out a short while back. That’s a bug and security release in that branch. We’re working on the 2.6.0 branch, and we’re working to incorporate a number of member-driven and -desired improvements to XOOPS. In terms of when that is, that’s kind of up to that developer group – the core team – and I believe it’s going to be out this year. I’m just not sure of the exact timing of that.

Rich: What will we see in this new release?

Mark: One of the biggest pushes that we’re doing is to bring a much more consistent management interface to the entire XOOPS collection of modules, and to bring forward a better API to make that easier for the module developers. That’s one of the key things that XOOPS has always done is try and make it easier for the module developers to do those routine things.

Rich: Michael, is there anything you’d like to add about upcoming releases?

Michael: As Mark mentioned, the focus of 2.6.0 is on refactoring and simplifying our architecture and our API. While other CMS systems might be written in a procedural way, XOOPS was from the very beginning very Object Oriented, which is even reflected in our name: XOOPS stands for eXtended Object Oriented Portal System. But over time, you know how it is, you tend to add baggage, and from time to time you need to do a little house cleaning. In XOOPS 2.6, that’s the focus, in order to keep XOOPS as pure OOP as possible, and the architecture and API as consistent as possible. We’ll be looking at that, and we’ll be adding some new ways, new classes, to make module development easier for our developers.

We hope, that after being a Project of the Month, more SourceForge members will try XOOPS, and will join our community as users and developers.

Rich: If folks are looking to get involved in the project, are the plugins the best way to get involved, or is there opportunities to get onto the core team?

Mark: There’s absolutely the opportunity to get on the core team. We would ask people to come in and get involved however they want to, whether that’s answering questions on the forum, helping with the documentation, building modules, getting involved with particular module developers to help enhance or build those. Then once you become familiar with all the various API issues within XOOPS, certainly come back and contribute those. We are very community driven, and there’s threads on our forums where, even if you’re not writing code, at least you can come back and give suggestions and/or contribute code to the project that helps the core developers fix or enhance a particular are. So while I’m not on the core team, I have certainly contributed code and suggestions back myself. XOOPS is a very secure system. It’s easy to develop on. It’s object oriented and the key is to keep code in that methodology, because it builds straight off of the core. It’s got a really good, mature presentation layer capability, so that when people want to change the look and feel, but don’t want to get into the PHP code – since we use Smarty templates, all you really need to know is HTML. So it’s really easy to change the look and feel of the site because of that – just getting involved with the HTML templates. For somebody who wants to get in and have their site have great functionality, get up and running, wants to be able to make the changes but isn’t a PHP developer, make their site look like their own and different from the others, it’s a quick, easy methodology to get going.

Rich: Congratulations on the project of the month.

Mark: We’re excited and we appreciate it, too. We appreciate the highlight.

Rich: I look forward to talking with you again some time. Thanks a lot.

Mark: Thanks, Richard.

Michael: Thanks, Richard, and thanks everybody for listening.

Go vote!

• Network Spoofer

  Network Spoofer lets you change websites on other people’s computers from an Android phone. After downloading simply log onto a Wifi network, choose a spoof to use and press start.
  Please note that there is no intention for Network Spoofer to include any malicious features. This application is a fun demonstration of how vulnerable home networks are to simple attacks, with permission of the network owner.

  Available on the Android Market.

• trixbox

  trixbox CE is an easy to install, VOIP phone system based on the Asterisk PBX. trixbox is designed for home or office use. trixbox CE includes CentOS linux, mysql, and all the tools needed to run a business quality phone system. (formerly asterisk@home)

• aMSN

  A very nice MSN compatible messenger application, aMSN Messenger is a multiplatform MSN messenger clone. Works pretty much like its Windows based counterpart. Perfect for keeping in touch with those friends who have not yet seen the light. Works on linux

• Process Hacker

  Process Hacker is a free and open source process viewer. This multi-purpose tool will assist you with debugging, malware detection and system monitoring. It includes powerful process termination, memory viewing/editing and other unique and specialized features.

• Shairport4w

  Airtunes emulator. “Shairport” for Windows. Stream music wirelessly to your PC from your iPod/iPad/iPhone/iTunes.

• 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.

• OS X Portable Applications

  OS X FOSS applications packaged as portable so that can carried around on any portable device, USB thumb drive, iPod, portable hard drive, memory card or other portable device.

• 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.

• TYPO3 Content Management Framework

  TYPO3 is an enterprise class Web CMS written in PHP/MySQL. It’s designed to be extended with custom written backend modules and frontend libraries for special functionality.
  It has very powerful integration of image manipulation.

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 and
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 being Project of the Month.

[See former Projects of the Month.]

Brian: Thank you. I’ve wanted Liferay to be on there for years. I’m very happy about it.

Rich: Tell me something about the project. How long has it been going, and what problem space is it trying to solve?

Brian: The project started in 2000, and the problem we’re trying to solve is that we want people to be able to build websites using the Java platform, quickly. That’s the problem it’s trying to solve. And specifically, we’re a portal. And if you look at traditional portals, from the last ten years, they’ve usually been very heavy-weight, sort of like your EJB app server. And so we look at ourselves in the Java space, we feel like we’re the Tomcat of the web platform. And we compete directly with Drupal, DotNetNuke – while Drupal’s for PHP, DotNetNuke is for dot.NET – And we’re a lightweight version of, say, WebSphere Portal, Oracle WebCenter, and so forth. And Microsoft Sharepoint. So that’s the problem space we’re in.

We want to help people build web sites. And not just websites in general, but social networks, and content management websites, very quickly.

Rich: Tell me some of your success stories. Who’s using your project successfully on, say, big websites?

Brian: Something that just launched recently, as far as a “cool factor”, is Marines.com.

It shows the content management aspect of Liferay. The site doesn’t look like a traditional portal, but it’s very pretty. Another one that’s in that vein would be Sesame Street. We all grew up with Big Bird, and it was one of the top websites last year.

So you can see how Liferay’s very flexible in that respect. Some other really cool examples would be developer.cisco.com. This is Cisco – they needed a collaboration website, and they built it on top of Liferay. Another one that’s sort of in that vein that’s more on the social network side would be teambeachbody.com. What they did was that they wanted to create a social network that wasn’t built around the friends you have, but the people that you coach into becoming better exercise people. You can go to that website and that’s all built on top of Liferay. So that’s just a small set of many many case studies that we have.

Rich: Do you have any sites that have surprised you? Sites that are doing something that … something unexpected with your product that maybe you hadn’t thought of when you designed it?

Brian: Not really because, well, people are doing a lot of things I didn’t expect, but none of them surprise us because Liferay itself was built to be flexible. So when we see them doing this we go, oh, yeah, that’s exactly what it was … it’s something it was built for. So not really – nothing that really surprises us.

Rich: On the community side, how do people get involved with your project? What sort of things might somebody get plugged into?

Brian: Usually, people download our product and then they’ll participate in our forums. I think we have 700,000 [Editor: Brian later corrected this to 500,000] posts this year. It’s getting close … I think we’ll reach 1,000,000 this year. There’s lots of people participating in the Liferay message boards. Another way is that they’ll find bugs, or they’ll contribute patches. And they can do that on our website, as well. Your traditional Open Source way, through forums, through our online collaboration stuff, and through our issue tracker. And, of course, our Symposiums and events where people come and have hackathons and we just code all day, and so forth.

Rich: Tell us about upcoming events.

Brian: I’m actually not sure if this has been announced yet, but I think some time in February or March we’re going to be opening up to the community where people actually come to our offices in LA, and we’re going to have a huge two-day hackathon. That’s mainly geared towards the community, and geek hackers. Towards developers and the general community, our ‘Java One’ or our ‘OSCon’ would be our Symposiums. And we’re having one in San Francisco this year, at the end of October, and we’re going to have one in Germany as well, so that people who can’t fly from Europe can attend both of the events. And those are the events where we showcase our case studies. We’ll have our clients, our community members, our partners and so forth, come and showcase their Liferay efforts.

Rich: Liferay.com is a commercial venture that’s based around the project – is that right?

Brian: Correct. Most people separate their ventures, where they’ll have a .org and a .com website. We didn’t see a reason to do that so we merged it. So .com is our community website, and when you log in, it gives you additional … for our customers, it gives you additional access. But both of them are hosted off of Liferay.com. We don’t separate the community’s effort from our commercial effort.

Rich: What sort of additional services do your paying customers have access to?

Brian: One of the things is that they get long-term support on the version that they’re using. A lot of the banks and large organizations that use us, they need the version of Liferay that they’re building on top of to be supported five years from now. That’s not something they can get from the community edition without themselves investing a ton of work. Another one is … we’re the experts in our own product. We have a lot of engineers working here, and we know our stuff. So they’ll pay for support for it, so that when they use the product and they run into an issue, instead of them spending ten hours on the issue, they can just call us and we’ll spend two hours, because we’ll diagnose it, and they’ll save a ton of time. Another one is, if they want to customize the product, we’ll do some professional services, we’ll help them implement it, or we’ll connect them with a partner that’s closer to them, or has expertise in their specific vertical. And we’ll partner with them in that sense. Those are the ways in which we make money. And Liferay’s actually grown the last couple of years. What’s unique about us as a company, and as a community, is that we’re the only Open Source company that I know of, of our size, that has no venture capital. We have about 300 employees – maybe more than that now, I don’t keep active count – across 7-10 countries. I don’t even know how many offices we have. So we’ve been able to bootstrap ourselves, make money, and provide a very good quality service to our customers.

Rich: Is the developer community around Liferay primarily your paid employees, or is there representation from outside of your company as well?

Brian: That’s a very interesting question, because we develop a lot of stuff in-house, with the collaboration of the community, but we do the majority of the push. But it’s hard to quantify, because even if we do the majority of the push, the community helps out so much in testing different environments, testing out different possible paths. If you think about how somebody can click through something, there’s practically an infinite way in which somebody could do something in some environment. So the community helps out a lot in patches, and a lot of time in features as well. But a lot of times what ends up happening is, the people contribute. They love working on Liferay, and we need to hire engineers. So even though they were a community member, they end up joining us, so that screws up the metrics. A lot of the people who are currently employed by Liferay were once community members. But they are no longer, because they’re not employed by us. So they can do what they were doing for fun, full time.

Rich: I see on your website that you’re currently hiring, so I guess that is still in action.

Brian: Yeah. It’s very much in action. I’d say that almost half of the people that we’ve hired came from the community. And that’s why we have to have so many different offices. Because they’re a developer in some country, and we say, you’re so good, we want you to work with us full time. Do the stuff you’re doing that’s awesome, but do it full time.

Rich: What’s in the future for the Liferay product?

Brian: We really see the portal as the web platform for delivering applications. We’ve seen how the different commercial offerings are morphing into that. I’ll give you an example. You look at SalesForce. They’re primarily a CRM app. But they’ve really morphed into a portal by providing a way for people to develop applications quickly. Or you look at Facebook. They’re primarily a social network, but the apps add so much value into it. Our sweet spot is, we are an app platform. We want to be the de facto standard for it, and I think we quickly are, if we are not already, in the Java space. We want to grow that. And from there we want to pivot by providing specific vertical apps that add value. So a quick example is, how did Microsoft do it? They started with Windows. From there they pivoted to Office, Internet Explorer, SQL Server, BizTalk, and SharePoint, and they’ve added all this value. You look at Oracle, they start off as a database, and now they’ve built all these apps for enterprise, and they do so much more than just databases. In the same way, we see our core bread and butter being the portal – being the web platform. We see ourselves pivoting and adding on additional apps that tie into the portal that would add a lot of value. And all that stuff would be Open Source, with a commercial offering as well for certain large enterprises. And one example of that would be our new product Liferay Sync. Liferay portal itself has always had a content management system and a document management system built in. We really beefed it up this past year, but what we realized is, as you know, a lot of people use local, operating system, desktop based programs that allow you to sync files. So what if I don’t want that stuff hosted by a third party, but I want to host it on Amazon, but I want to own the data. I want to be the one to manage the servers not some third party. They can do that now. So they don’t have to worry about 10G, or 20G, or 100G, they can just get a TB, and pay a much smaller fee. So those are some of the ways in which we’re extending beyond the portal.

Rich: Tell me about the beginning of this project. Why’d you get started in the first place?

Brian: What happened was, it was around 2000, during the peak of the dot.com boom, and my pastor asked me to build a website for his church. I was also working for a consulting company at the time that was heavily emphasizing social networks. Back in 2000, they just gave it a different name, which was ‘e-business communities.’ They really stressed social networks, and they really stressed collaboration online. So I thought, wouldn’t it be great if my church could leverage the software that we were using at work, and the company at the time had about 200 people. My church size is about 150-200 people. If we could all collaborate online, that would be great. So I went to the software vendor, and they said to me, sure – it’ll cost you $100,000 for the license, and every user per year year is going to be $200. There’s no way my church can afford that. So, I looked at what the product did, and I looked at Open Source alternatives, and I didn’t like any of them. So I started writing it. Our church was the first implementation of that, and then I started to tinker with it. But I wanted it to be more than just for churches, because I wanted it to benefit a lot of non-profits, a lot of different organizations. And so I tried to make it generic. And over time as it became more and more generic, lots of institutions started using it – education sector, government sector, banks, financial sector. All these different organizations. And that’s what’s led to what we have today. And it’s been twelve years since we first played around with it.

And I have to thank SourceForge, because if it was not for Sourceforge, there’s no way we could have distributed our app – our program – back then. And if you look at our downloads, you guys have given us tons of bandwidth over the years. So I’m very very appreciative of what SourceForge has done for us.

Rich: Thank you very much for speaking with me. And, again, congratulations.

Brian: Yeah. Thank you for even letting us participate in SourceForge. Thank you for all the stuff you guys have done for us. I really appreciate what you guys do and very thankful for the award.

And now it’s time to start thinking about next month. Each month, candidates are chosen for the POTM vote based on their project activity during the previous month. Below are the candidates for July. You can cast your vote at http://twtpoll.com/b0zo1b

The poll will run until June 25th, so that we have time to put together the POTM page before July 1. So, go vote!

• SugarCRM – commercial open source CRM

  A complete CRM system for businesses of all sizes. Core CRM functionality includes sales automation, marketing campaigns, support cases, project mgmt, calendaring and more. Built in PHP, supports MySQL and SQL Server.

• Mega Mario

  Mega Mario is a Super Mario Bros. 1 clone. It features everything the original features – with better graphics, higher resolution, smoother movement and new levels. The story of Mario and Luigi continues, in old-school style. Also visit the official HP.

• 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.

• Fink

  Fink is an attempt to bring the full world of Unix Open Source software to Darwin and Mac OS X. Packages are downloaded and built automatically and installed into a tree managed by dpkg, all with full dependency tracking.

• KeePass Password Safe

  KeePass is a free, open source, light-weight and easy-to-use password manager for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and mobile devices. You can store your passwords in a highly-encrypted database, which is locked with one master password or key file.

• 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 format

• 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.

• UFO:Alien Invasion

  It is the year 2084. You control a secret organisation charged with defending Earth from a brutal alien enemy. Build up your bases, prepare your team, and dive head-first into the fast and flowing turn-based combat.