Tag Archives: project of the month
Feb 1, 2013 

Vote for the March Project of the Month

The February Project of the Month is Kiwix. Time to start voting for the March POTM.

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.

Dec 1, 2012 

December 2012 Project of the Month: JStock

Rich: SourceForge is pleased to announce the December 2012 Project of the Month.

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!

Oct 1, 2012 

ProjectLibre: October 2012 Project of the Month

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.

Sep 6, 2012 

Vote for the October Project Of The Month

PeaZip is the September project of the month, and we’re already looking forward to October. Here’s the candidates for the October project of the month. Have a good look, and then go vote!

  • 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.

Sep 1, 2012 

September 2012 Project Of The Month: PeaZip

SourceForge is delighted to announce that September 2012′s Project of the Month is PeaZip, a compression/decompression utility supporting dozens of compression formats. I spoke (via email) with Giorgio Tani, the lead developer on this project, about the project, its history, and its future.

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!

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