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Posted: Fri, 05 Sep 2008 22:46:51 +0000
Posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 by hinojosa
Category: GeneralWell, guess what… We made some changes around here and man, did you all notice! We’ve taken a ton off feedback on that, going both ways! We’ve been listening and we’re trying new things and will keep doing that till we get it right. That’s why I’m writing, to let you know what we’re up to!
First, we’re making some changes to some of the new site design that are already out there. I posted a note on some changes that are gonna drop on Monday, in the Community Hub User Interface Feedback forum.
We’re also working on some changes to the project Trackers. I put a post in the UI forum that gives some detail on most of the changes. That’s gonna show up on Monday too.
We’ve heard your input loud and clear. We’re working on responding and incorporating what works, logging other stuff for future changes, and queuing up others for upcoming updates.
Your input is important. Please try out the new Tracker and give us your feedback in the UI forum so that we can continue to improve on the design and function.
Cheers!
Daniel Hinojosa - the SourceForge.net support guy.
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Where do community managers fit?
Posted: Fri, 05 Sep 2008 05:51:01 +0000
Posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 by Ross Turk
Category: OpinionOur good friend Joe Brockmeier, community manager for openSUSE, has just started blogging for ZDnet. In one of his inaugural posts, he ruminates over where a community manager belongs in corporate structure: engineering or marketing? His post was in response to Stormy Peters, who thinks the support team is a good place. As a fellow community manager, these posts are a fantastic opportunity for me to talk about a subject that’s near and dear to me: me.
I report to the VP of Marketing, and I won’t be shy about telling you that’s caused me a bit of stress. As an engineer, I always thought that marketing was just the art of yelling at the top of your lungs about some crappy product to people who don’t care, but that’s only true in organizations that don’t understand marketing. Marketing departments generally fall into two categories: ones that shout at the market and and ones that talk with it. The defining difference is whether marketing is an inspiration for the company’s strategy or merely its slave.
If my job were to coordinate bug fixes with upstream providers or negotiate solutions to interoperability issues (like it probably is for Joe Brockmeier from Novell), it’d probably make sense to think of it as an engineering discipline. If it were to find ways for developers to contribute to our application or govern the ones that already do (as it probably is for someone like Stormy at Gnome) it might be more appropriate under a product management team.
However, we’re dealing with a community of scale where our role is to provide the environment where people can produce - not to coordinate their actual production. So community management at SourceForge.net is about observing the community as a whole, engaging as much as we can, and tweaking the platform so that people can get more done. Since our marketing team is a “talking” team and not a “shouting” one, community management fits there nicely.
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September’s Project of the Month
Posted: Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:58:51 +0000
Posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 by Lisa Hoover
Category: Project of the MonthThis month’s Project of the Month (POTM) is a very cool program called WinSCP. It’s lead developer explains what the project is all about:
“WinSCP is an open source SFTP client and FTP client for Windows. Its main function is the secure file transfer between a local and a remote computer. Beyond this, WinSCP offers basic file manager functionality. It uses Secure Shell (SSH) and supports, in addition to Secure FTP, also legacy SCP protocol. It was the first ever GUI SCP (and later SFTP) client for Windows.”
WinSCP has been around a long time and has lots of loyal users. Read more about it at the September Project of the Month page. You can also check the main POTM page to learn about past winners.
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What happens when Google Adsense gets political
Posted: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:44:32 +0000
Posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 by Ross Turk
Category: OpinionI was looking through Slashdot’s polls yesterday, and noticed their politically-charged poll “How many homes do you own?”, ostensibly regarding McCain’s recent difficulty remembering the answer to that very question. As funny as that is, the leaderboard advertisement that (presumably) Google decided to run was even funnier: a message from John McCain 2008.
I’m pretty doubtful that John McCain’s campaign has selectively targeted pages where users are being polled about how many houses they own. It’s probably more likely that he’s targeting Slashdot as a whole, or polls in general. Either way, I think Google has (completely by accident) made a point it probably wasn’t trying to.
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This Just In: Open Source is Legit
Posted: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:07:55 +0000
Posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 by Ross Turk
Category: OpinionMany of you have already read the news: Yesterday, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that, yes, a software company has infringed upon an open source project’s copyright by failing to adhere to the terms of its license. Specifically, the Artistic License.
If you keep up with what’s been going on, you can skip this paragraph. KAM Industries sells software that powers model railroads, and used some technology from the SourceForge.net project JMRI in its Decoder Commander product. Last May, a judge ruled that KAM Industries did, in fact, violate the terms of the Artistic License…but since it was only a breach of contract it wasn’t a big enough deal to do anything about. Yesterday’s ruling found that it was also in violation of the original copyright, which is almost certainly enough to convince a judge to make them stop. I’m not a lawyer, but that sounds about right to me.
There was much rejoicing by Dana Blankenhorn at ZDNet and Matt Asay at CNet, who considered it a great victory for open source. I think it is too. PJ at Groklaw had a different spin, though. She believes that the open source community pretty much dodged a bullet with this judgement, and needs to be a bit more savvy about license creation in the future.
But let’s be fair about that. It’s kind of hard to be savvy about licenses when there are so many to choose from that developers are unlikely to read them all (and even more unlikely to understand them.) I think a lot of us dreamily reminisce about the days when we could just code and not worry about contracts, injunctions, or copyright laws. Will it ever be that way again?
No, I think the best we can hope for now is complete victory: a set of licenses, clearly defined and understandable, and an international legal system that is intimately familiar with all of them. But then we’d also have to deal with the postbellum mundanity that sucks the excitement out of every successful cool movement. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you weren’t at LinuxWorld this year.
At its most fundamental level, open source is about legality: unless open source licenses can rely on our legal system to enforce the freedoms they’re trying to protect, open source doesn’t really exist. So let’s give a round of applause for the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and for JMRI for standing up for what’s right!
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August’s Project of the Month
Posted: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 21:50:35 +0000
Posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 by Lisa Hoover
Category: Project of the MonthWho stole summer?
It’s already time to tell you about the August Project of the Month and that means it’s the last PotM for the season (but, of course, not for the year). Enomalism gets the honors this month. It’s a really neat virtual server management project that’s been growing steadily since it first got started in 2005.
To find out more about Enomalism and why businesses like Intel and France Telecom use it, check out the newest Project of the Month page.
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SourceForge Community Tattooing
Posted: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:54:39 +0000
Posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 by Ross Turk
Category: GeneralLast Thursday, we announced the winners of our annual Community Choice Awards. As I mentioned, we did 16 hours of cumulative tattooing during our Community Choice Awards party. I’ve been going through some of the pictures that we took, and here are the best ones:
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The Award Categories Changed A Bit…
Posted: Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:07:52 +0000
Posted on Saturday, July 26th, 2008 by Ross Turk
Category: GeneralOne last thing: There was some concern about the two satirical categories this year, Most Likely to be Ambiguously Accused of Patent Violation and Most Likely to Get Users Sued. People felt that they might draw a legal target on the winner, and that it might be potentially embarrassing. Most of you get what we were trying to say, but we still wanted to make sure our message was absolutely unmistakable.
We changed the two categories to Most Likely to be Ambiguously and Baselessly Accused of Patent Violation and Most Likely to Get Users Sued by Anachronistic Industry Associations Defending Dead Business Models. We hope that this compromise removes any legal teeth behind these categories while still preserving the sarcastic and satirical tone we intended.
Sorry to change things around on everyone, but if you’re upset about the change you probably didn’t get the point.
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The Community Choice Awards Winners
Posted: Sat, 26 Jul 2008 05:01:48 +0000
Posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 by Ross Turk
Category: GeneralHey everyone! I’m back from OSCON and tired enough to go to the hospital and get an IV of something to fix me. Before I do that, though, I’d like to announce that we revealed the winners in the 2008 Community Choice Awards last night during our party!
Before I get to them, though, I’d like to tell you a few other cool things about the party:
- We had the perfect number of people at the party. The vibe was great, people were connecting, and everyone liked the food and drinks. Entertainment was varied throughout the evening, partially because of spontaneity and partially because of mismanagement. But it was all good.
- Yes, like every good party, there was a fight. Right at the very end. Nobody saw it, but at least I got to feel completely in charge while escorting the offender out (flanked with a bouncer far more capable of the necessary force than I.) It was totally Hollywood.
- We gave out free tattoos, in case you haven’t heard. Lots of ‘em. We totaled 16 consecutive hours of tattooing across four artists. Three other people (maybe four) got the Tux penguin that I have on my arm. That was awesome.
We also all got to hear Sam Ramji from Microsoft announce that OpenOffice.org won Best Project for Education. It wasn’t rigged, although that would be pretty ironic given the recent controversy over standards. Sam is a really nice guy, and I think he handled it well. I want to see a high quality dialog happen between Microsoft and the rest of the community. OpenOffice.org went on to win two additional awards: Best Project for the Enterprise and Best Project.
So! No more screwing around. The winners are:
- Best Project: OpenOffice.org
- Best Project for the Enterprise: OpenOffice.org
- Best Project for Educators: OpenOffice.org
- Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition: phpMyAdmin
- Best Project for Multimedia: VLC
- Best Project for Gamers: XBMC
- Most Likely to Change the World: Linux
- Best New Project: Magento
- Most Likely to Be Ambiguously and Baselessly Accused of Patent Violation: WINE
- Most Likely to Get Users Sued by Anachronistic Industry Associations Defending Dead Business Models: eMule
- Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins: phpMyAdmin
- Best Tool or Utility for Developers: Notepad++
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Community Choice Awards nominations now closed
Posted: Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:42:58 +0000
Posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 by Lisa Hoover
Category: GeneralThe votes are in and we’re in the back room frantically tallying to find out who the winners are in this year’s Community Choice Awards.
Overall, this year’s finalists were an impressive mixture of old favorites and new names. Winners from last year reappearing as 2008 finalists in their same categories include Firebird, a relational database; Audacity, an audio editor and recorder; and ScummVM, a cross-platform enabler for game engines. But each of these established veterans face competition from newcomers threatening to run the table: virtualization platform PortableApps, popular content management platform Drupal, and office software suite OpenOffice were finalists in multiple categories.
Finalists in the “Best Project for Educators” category featured some projects you’d expect — OpenOffice, the course management system Moodle, and an astronomy teaching tool, Stellarium. There was plenty of thinking outside the box, too. VoIP Web conferencing tool VMutki, was also among the nominees, as were XAMPP, an Apache distribution that contains MySQL, PHP and Perl, and the aforementioned PortableApps.
This year’s categories were designed to call attention to some of the issues developers face when they choose to create open source projects. For instance, the category “Most Likely to Get Users Sued” serves as a reminder that while developers bear the brunt of intellectual property disputes, users aren’t automatically immune. However, that’s not likely to keep people away from such notable projects as password manager KeePass Password Safe or XBMC media center. Indeed, winning a Community Choice Award may actually drive more traffic to projects like the filesharing clients eMule and Shareaza, or bittorent client Azureus.
Of course, developers and SysAdmins are the heartbeat of SourceForge and each has its own category of nominations. The former highlights projects like MySQL tool phpMyAdmin and Code::Blocks, an integrated development environment for C/C++. The latter features utilities SysAdmins love, like ISP Control Panel and Amanda Network Backup.
Voting for this year’s Community Choice Awards is closed and the winners will be announced later this week at the party we’re hosting July 24th at Portland’s Jupiter Hotel (and giving away free tattoos). If you can’t make it to the event, we’ll post the winners on SourceForge’s Web site, on July 25th. Stay tuned!
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