Gallery YOUR PHOTOS ON YOUR WEBSITE Sourceforge Advisory Council Bharat Mediratta March 9 th, 2006

About Gallery Web based photo sharing product Written in PHP Installed on 300,000+ websites Joined SourceForge.net in June 2000 In the top 30 most active projects ~30 member team

What’s great about SourceForge? Most central place to find Open Source –If we rank highly here, we get found Content distribution network! –Without this, we cannot afford to release code Instant Feature Set –Small projects get everything they need to get off the ground (bug tracker, cvs, mailing lists, etc) High availability -- SF’s uptime is excellent

What else is great? Rapid technical support (for most things) Distributed project administration Pretty good site documentation Easily supports high volume, archived mailing lists. Compile farm can be very handy

What’s not so great? SF.net is very tech centric. –Eg, FRS confuses the heck out of newbies: From: Subject: Help! I hve been trying to download Gallery and am frustrated because I keep getting sent in circles. When I click "download now" I get information on updates or an add to buy a T-shirt. How do I download the program? HELP!

What’s bad? Feature set is years out of date –Forums aren’t in the same ballpark as best of breed products –Project search is underpowered –Trackers aren’t very customizable. We resort to putting special keywords like [G2] in the subject –Mailman is way out of date. Spam overruns us.

What’s bad (cont’d) User Interface is woeful at times –Why is the “submit news” box 55 x 6? You can’t write anything reasonable in that. –Admin navigation makes no sense at times. Eg, you click News -> Admin, instead of the other way around. –Why can’t I update info about more than one file at once in FRS? –How many bugs do I have in the G2 category? Forums are completely worthless. –Not enough admin tools to keep them in check

Ow, SourceForge hurts me! CVS is so s-l-o-w! –Development stops! –This has gotten better (thanks, guys!), and SVN holds promise –Developer vs. Anonymous slows down our iterations. Users can’t easily find existing bugs – …so they file duplicates!

Make the pain stop! Tasks system is very weak –Who is the task assigned to? –Why didn’t I get notified? –Who submitted this task? File releases are so painful. –Entire projects (like ReleaseForge) have formed to improve this one problem! –Gallery has released files and counting. Last night’s release of 134 files took me 4 hours, largely because of FRS.

What’s missing? SF apps cannot compete with best of breed products (eg: phpBB forums) SF embedded apps are not up to date with the latest code (eg: mailman is way, way behind) SF does not provide easy access to the data. –You can download the entire CVS repository, or up to 32MB of your tracker data in XML –We have written apps to scrape the HTML pages (!) to get tracker data (so that we can do things like feature voting)

So what does all this mean? SF’s “instant feature set” makes sense for new projects As projects grow, they are unable to fit their needs into what SF offers SF needs to decide whether they care about keeping larger projects

What can SourceForge do? Provide APIs to get to the data –Then admins can automate posting news stories, file releases, administering the tracker –Letting projects interoperate with SF.net data so they can hook into the SF backbone. Focus on usability! –Newbies need to be able to download the app! –We want newbies to be able to file bugs easily –Keep tools like mailman current! –Add greater flexibility to tracker/tasks tools to help projects manage themselves.

Pie-in-the-Sky things to try Switch to using best-of-breed applications like phpBB for forums. Let projects pay for a higher level of support (not just users) –Super fast CVS is worth $$$ to us Open source it again! –We’re PHP devs – we would submit patches.

Conclusion SF is a huge enabler in the Open Source arena – it gets new projects off the ground As projects grow, SF becomes less and less useful as the project outgrows what SF offers With a focus on usability and data interchange, SF could provide the backbone for larger projects and keep them as customers.