If you’re a regular visitor to SourceForge Web site, then you’ve no doubt learned your way around by now. If you’re new here, however, it might seem a little daunting to think you have to sift through more than 175,000 projects to find what you need. Rich Menga of PCmech.com put together a terrific instructional video that shows you how to navigate around the site and find exactly what you need.
I asked Rich what motivated him to put together this video. He told me that even though his audience understands the value of open source software, they’re not always sure exactly where to get it.
“A good majority of PCMech.com’s audience has an understanding of what open source is but do not know where to get it specifically,” says Menga. “To me, SourceForge is the one-stop-shop for everything open source. It’s large, has the most choice, has a proper ‘business’ look with no glitz (very much appreciated) and, simply put, if it’s not on SourceForge it probably doesn’t exist. I have 100% confidence in recommending anyone to go to SourceForge first for anything open source.”
Rich made the video on his custom-built Windows PC, using the commercial video software WebCamMax. He’s favors a number of open source software apps, however, including Filezilla, Launchy, Apophysis, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Notepad++, OpenOffice.
If you’re wondering what the deal is with all the stats data associated with each project, then be sure to check out SourceForge Community Manager Ross Turk’s explanation. He says, “People are often surprised to learn that our formula for calculating a project’s activity percentile is public, and can be found in our Site Docs. Essentially, it’s a combination of three different classes of activity: traffic, development, and communication.”
Marketplace has been getting lots of attention since its December, 2007 launch. If you’d like to know more about how to make the most of it for your project, then have a look at Senior Manager of Customer Support Daniel Hinojosa’s tips.
Do you have questions about the SourceForge Web site? Ask them in the comments!