Slashdot Mirror

And you got the idea from Advogato. Or maybe it was just that obvious :).

Assuming that all their claims are true, there really are only two major reasons in deciding not to use Prevayler. When you can't fit all your data into memory (as your suggestion states: small projects), and if you're looking to easily change your object "schema" in Java on the fly because of poor user requirements or lousy functional specifications.

To address the first, I've observed that the lower profile smaller inexpensive projects at large corporations outnumber the higher profiled medium-to-large expensive projects. The smaller projects also use smaller databases and quite a few of them to this day are not even client/server, let alone web-based (higher expense due to several factors like requiring multiple servers such as web and database - although, some companies reduce this cost by forcing departments to share servers).

What I'm suggesting here is that you could use Prevayler wherever a FoxPro (.dbf), Access (.mdb) or FileMaker-Pro based application was being considered by a department. It's unlikely you'd see stable .dbf, .mdb or even .pst files getting larger than 1 GB without permament corruption (or if used frequently, without hourly indexing). So, if the .dbf files are only hundreds of megabytes in size because the department may not simply generate that much data, Prevayler would be a good choice to load that data into memory.

Now, because Prevayler doesn't require the extra cost of a separate database server, you'd only need to have a low-cost webserver, and the departmental workstations don't require anything additional installed (like Foxpro, VB, or Access runtimes). The department saves money in the long run for not having to pay for tech visits each time VB, foxpro, or access crashes and causes data corruption and for other related reasons. Also, the webserver would be low-cost for the simple reason that it wouldn't need to use very expensive RAID, SCSI disk-arrays, or SANS. You'd only need an IDE drive approximately 5 Gigabytes for every Gigabyte of RAM your using. So 1 GB RAM, 5 GB HD. Now, we know that HD are ridiculously cheap, so why not a 80 GB drive just because it probably comes with the server in first place?

As for the schema change problems, there's a couple of suggestions: 1) Use a Business Analyst and hold his feet to the fire for getting the requirements right the first time around (or at least minimize the impact of change on how the clients actually do their business). 2) If you can't afford a Business Analyst, then study XP-Programming and you'll see that iteration, refactoring, and testing with the user/domain-expert will minimize the need to do ad-hoc schema changes later on in the project's development. Admittedly, user requests for ad-hoc queries appear to be a part of the best designed system's life. So, in a worst-case scenario, you could always use any number of Java classes out there to serialize the data into a .dbf and give the users Crystal Reports or some Open Source variant to query it. Then, the queries that are used the most, could be migrated into version 1.1 of the Java application as "schema" changes.

Multiple small projects that replace Foxpro/VB/Access specs would allow a Java newbie to cut his teeth and get up to speed on OOP development.

For answers to other questions, I've also looked at this link:

= 9J =

Here is an interesting Q and A I ran into about Revalence

http://www.advogato.org/article/398.html

In defense of slashdot, this project is interesting, but like everyone else has been saying, these guys need some serious PR lessons. And while our behaviour might not be all that dignified, it's only in reaction to their blatant and shameless over-hyping which clouds any technical value their product actually has.

What's more is that the project lead has unsuccessfully trolled dbforums before. Here's some nice quotes:

Some people like tables, some people like objects. Were you at least convinced that Prevayler is an ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE faster and simpler OBJECT persistence mechanism than using ANY relational database for that?

Prevayler - TRANSPARENT persistence for Java. 9983 TIMES faster than ORACLE. 3251 TIMES faster than MySQL. I would not believe it if I were you. But I would take a look: http://www.prevayler.org

You can probably google him and find more.

Probably seems ad hominem to point out someone's trolling tendencies, but read some of the threads he's participated in and the responses point out that Prevayler is nothing but a persistent object store with a transaction log all stored in RAM for speed. Does this replace an RDBMS? No. As said many times here, they each serve different purposes and each have different features and drawbacks. Promoting either as a THE data solution is foolish. RDBMS's give you advantages like physical and logical data independence, full transactional support and unlike Prevayler, include a query language to access and modify your data. If you need any of these features, then go with RDBMS. Prevayler mainly gives you a natural (from an oop view) and quick way of having objects persist, and using it as a simpler model than the relational one to build an OO app around, with the drawbacks that things like referential integrity and queries are largely for you to handle.

That said, what of your questions has remained unanswered?

• Is anyone currently using this non-database solution in production? I'd say the lack of comments answering in the positive would make that a no, or at most possibly yes, but it's a secret.
• Was there a significant learning curve to speak of? That's difficult when it's tied to the above. Although the Zodb thread gives hints on the learning curve of doing queries over the object store.
• Is anyone considering using it in a transactional environment where speed is the paramount need? Again, silence says no.
• And, are there any objections to using Prevayler that haven't been answered at the Prevayler wiki? Google is your friend, but if not then try this advogato article here that covers some nice discussion about Prevayler, although a little outdated.
• ... Is Prevayler a better way? Again, as its been said many times already, it depends on your app. However it's notable that OO to relational are not as disparate as one might believe, see here. Enterprise Objects are a good counter-example, but by all means probably not the only one to your statement.

In anycase, I'd like to clarify a few things myself:

1. I'm in no way affiliated with the Prevaylent project, and simply found it yesterday on Slashdot. I did find out something interesting. The product apparently has less than 600 lines of code! So much discussion over so little leads me to believe very few people actually bothered to look over the source before posting an opinion on it.

2. Slashdot won't allow me to post booksized articles, so I had to cram as many questions as I could into that first paragraph (sadly, none of them were answered). The side-effects were two: an awful marketoid writing-style, and a highly polarized discussion of the subject (I don't mind the second effect at all as it's certainly been lively). You'll notice that the style of the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs is quite different from the 1st.

3. I have yet to see a question from a Slashdotter regarding the product that hasn't already been answered either in the wiki(have to dig for it) or articles by the product's author. I doubt any product is that good, so I place the blame on Slashdotters (including myself) for not being more original.

4. What is so "suspicious" about my nickname? Please, I don't wish be involved in conspiracy theories. :-)

I'm sincere in my attempt at finding out the answers to my questions. Unfortunately, due to the inability to post under my pseudonym without taking points from others, you may doubt that is really ninejaguar's reply. If so, ninejaguar could at any time post under that pseudonym and claim this reply to be false (I promise, that won't happen).

If you have any questions for me, I'd be glad to try and answer them. Don't be too disappointed if I don't have a satisfactory answer; I'm still a slashdotter afterall. In the meantime, I ran across this link in another AC's post. Has some more answers regarding this Prevayler.

= 9J =

One thing I remember reading is that you can use anything you like to query your objects, as long as it understands objects efficiently. One answer is to use Java, or if you like you can use XPath or XQuery as suggested here.

Cheers

By picking a fight with IBM and the free software comunity, SCO has backed itself into a corner. The company faces a very real possibility of not existing in several years if they don't win their case convincingly. Where does this leave all their partners who have based businesses on their products? Up a creek. Here's where you, the Linux consultant come in: why not reach out to these people and help them transition away from SCO's crappy products?

Was done in 1998 with the GNU Rope project. Unfortunately this is the last we ever heard of it and after that it was lost in the fog of other vaporware.

Original announcement here, An Advogado discussion of the project here.

Michael

The FSEDU Project has been been founded to protect the students rights from predatory companies and universities.

We have developed a students bill of rights
here

1. You have the right to use free software instead of proprietary software for all school-related tasks. The school shall not impede this right in any way.

2. You have the right to demand open file formats:

2.1. Allow sincere choice of software/operating system

2.2. Openly specified and freely implementable

2.3. Work with completely Free systems

3. You have the right to publish your homework assignments as you see fit, for profit or gratis.

4. You have the right to publish what you learn, in your own words, for profit or gratis.

Not only Microsoft is taking away students rights, but also our beloved REDHAT as well

See my open letter to REDHAT here REDHATLETTER

and HERE

Little do people know but the Microsoft licenses
have clauses in them that require the schools to monitor the student and report them to microsoft if they suspect them of violating the EULA. This is probably illegal in Europe.

Here are some selections from the MS Student License Aggreement :
http://www.microsoft.com/education/?ID=CAStuden tOp tion
"
Perpetual Student Use Rights
Upon graduation, students licensed under the Student Option are granted
perpetual use rights for the selected Campus Agreement products.

All other students are only licensed to use the software for the
subscription term. These licenses are non-perpetual (meaning the
student does not own the license). Upon leaving the institution
(besides graduation) or expiration of the subscription term, students
are required to remove the software. Your institution is responsible
for communicating the appropriate use rights to students when
distributing the software. Guidelines for facilitating compliance are
outlined in the Master Campus Agreement Terms and Conditions. To the
extent that your institution follows these guidelines, you will not be
held responsible for students' failure to remove the software.
"
>
THis is the kernel of the problem. Now the university is the henchman
of microsoft.

The worst thing is that taxpayer money is being spent on taking the basic rights of the students way.

What's to stop a whole bunch of people giving themselves high ratings and good feedback, and then stealing other people's books?

I suggest they use something like the Advogato trust metric to maintain the integrity of their system. This allows bad "nodes" to be isolated and damage to the system avoided.

I also think that there should be penalties, like at any library, for having overdue books. Get a bad rating from one person is just a slap on the wrist.

"Photo-quality" prints are typically 300 DPI. If you want to print a 4 x 6 image, that means you need and image that is 1200x1800 pixels

"dot matrix" = less than 144 dpi

"near letter quality" is 144 to 195.9 dpi

"letter quality" is 196 to 383.9 dpi

"Star Trek quality" is 384 dpi and above

"Photo-quality" prints are typically 300 DPI. If you want to print a 4 x 6 image, that means you need and image that is 1200x1800 pixels

"dot matrix" = less than 144 dpi

"near letter quality" is 144 to 195.9 dpi

"letter quality" is 196 to 383.9 dpi

"Star Trek quality" is 384 dpi and above

For this kind of investor fraud, and for extortion, SCO executives should be charged as criminals. Here is an excellent Advogato article summarizing how and more of why.

So everyone who is just getting their feet wet will have No Idea what the Power Coders are thinking, right?

That's true of any programming language. The question is where you put the simplicity and where you put the complexity. (I've written about this before -- though see Schuyler's take for a better explanation).

Unless you have a really, really simple language that has no libraries and no chance to grow, odds are you'll have to adapt to something that's different in someone else's code, if you ever read code from someone else. Larry's really good about hiding complexity and allowing people to be productive while knowing a small fraction of what's available in Perl. I believe Perl 6 will make it easier to encapsulate this complexity where you don't have to see it unless you really really need to see it.

What you describe sounds like a standard maintenance program. I don't write Perl code that anyone off of the street can read without knowing Perl. I write code that competent developers can maintain. A big part of that is self-discipline, which no language worth using can enforce.

It seems like constant change in a language would be a bad thing, right?

It certainly can be. I'm willing to go on record that the problems in Bugzilla were more lack of discipline on the part of its developers than any systemic problem. Consider how often any open source project is rewritten and redesigned (not refactored). This is a problem that afflicts every language.

This sounds like a pretty wacky claim on Microsoft's part. The only example that comes to my mind is maybe samba, which uses the Microsoft SMB protocol.

Now unfortunately for Microsoft, it is legal to reverse engineer a protocol for the sake of interoperability, when the documentation is not available from the company. This is clearly in the best interest of the public, which is most of us :)

Also check out this web page on How to Reverse Engineer and still be Legal.

So far the articles are:

• Why We Should All Test the New Linux Kernel
• Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel
• Use Validators and Load Generators to Test Your Web Applications
• Free Hosting Service HTML Validation Test Page
• Pointers to C++ Member Functions

The articles are all under the GNU Free Documentation License. However, Debian has decided the GFDL is non-free according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. I plan to change the license to one that satisfies Debian's requirements, but haven't settled on one yet.

Any non-freeness of the GFDL shouldn't prevent you including it in your distribution, the issue is that invariant sections forbid some kinds of modifications. I discuss this further in Which License for Free Documentation?

• RIAA member
• GPL violator
• DMCA wielder
• Freedom hater
• DRM purveyor

As a general rule, I don't believe that it is essential for people to have permission to modify all sorts of articles and books. The issues for writings are not necessarily the same as those for software. For example, I don't think you or I are obliged to give permission to modify articles like this one, which describe our actions and our views.

However, this has caused friction with the Debian community, because they feel that the fact that the GNU Free Documentation License provides for Invariant Sections and mandatory Cover Texts makes it non-free. They're working on a policy statement to this effect, and getting ready to move all the GFDL'ed documentation from main to non-free. You can find out more about that in Why You Shouldn't Use the GNU FDL.

I observed some of the debate between the Debian developers and RMS on the debian-legal list, and while there are other significant issues, the main sticking point seemed to come down to whether or not political activism had any place in technical documentation. You can imagine Stallman's position on that. I come from way before "Open Source" was ever heard of, so I personally share Stallman's position.

It's an issue for me because I have some articles which use the GFDL, so I discussed the issue at some length in Which License for Free Documentation? The followup discussion has been very helpful.

Now why is this relevant to music?

The issue of whether it is moral (from Stallman's perspective) to forbid alteration of a work I believe comes down to whether the work is primarily functional in nature, or expressive of a personal opinion. The obvious utility of software, and the ability to combine code from different packages into new programs tips the balance heavily towards the side that says one must allow software to be altered. But that's not so clear with writing, which may be either unexpressive technical documentation, or impassioned political expression.

Music is much more like writing than software. Someone who is not a musician might not see it this way, but I feel that my music is an expression of my opinion. I can well see that there is other music that could not possibly be considered that way, and so I would support Stallman's position that not only copying but modification of such music must be permitted.

However, I don't think Stallman has completely thought this through when considering music explicitly. Have a look at his piece Regarding Gnutella.

Just to give one current, more or less viable Parrot application that I know of, the virtual machine been embedded as mod_parrot , which can in principle allow you to run Parrot bytecode in Apache. Why would anyone want to write web applications in what amounts to assembly code? Well of course, most people wouldn't, but as Perl6 matures this could become a viable competitor to mod_perl ...and mod_python , mod_tcl , mod_scheme , etc.

More to the point, the development of Parrot has forced a cleanup of the Perl API. The current situation where the reference implementation is the only implementation has never been theoretically clean -- other languages, like Python, C, and Java, have long had multiple implementations, and this has consistently been a healthy thing for the evolution of the language. Abstracting out the virtual machine layer will allow Perl6 to have a pluggable runtime layer (e.g. replace runtime compilation & execution of bytecode into, say, dynamic execution of precompiled bytecode (as Python does), or direct compilation from source to executable machine code (as C does). More recently & concretely, abstracting out the VM layer has been the motivation for Ponie -- an effort to re-implement Perl5 to run on Parrot, and in the process give Perl that abstracted alternate implementation that most other languages have. This will be a very healthy thing, both for Perl5 and for Perl6.

If there has been a dropoff in contributions, it isn't due to Parrot work. Dan Sugalski et al have done excellent work here, and I think most people in the community recognize this. If there has been a dropoff, the much more mundane explanation is probably just the taking economy: a whole lot of people just don't have the spare cash to give these days.

Yes, it is still possible to get work without recruiters. And it has the same fresh clean taste as air does when you quit smoking.

When you're done reading that, read Fighting Age Discrimination and Buzzword Bingo in the Software Industry.

Thank you for your attention.

• Why We Should All Test the New Linux Kernel - Japanese
• Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel - Japanese

I am looking for translations into other languages for all my Linux Quality Database articles - there are other articles on web application quality and C++ programming, and more will be posted from time to time.

They are all under the GNU Free Documentation License, but for reasons explained in Which License for Free Documentation? I am planning to change the license soon to another one.

from an article dated jun-29-2003:

There's going to be a vote in the European Parliament on 1 September (originally today, Monday 30 June 2003) that will have enormous implications on the worldwide software market.

The vote will be on whether to adopt a report by its Legal Affairs and Internal Market Committee that recommends the rules on patenting of software be relaxed in line with existing laws in the US and Japan.

It looks as though, despite widespread and deep criticism, the report will be adopted. And this will probably mean a shift of power from small software companies and the open source community to large multi-national corporations.

--

note that there is already an example of microsoft using its patent of the ASF file format to force a reverse engineered feature to be removed from virtualdub software. you can read about it here.

This is already being done. Here are some examples:

• IBM and Rice University have both licensed patents having to do with register allocation, so that GCC can use them.
• IBM has licensed its RCU patent, which is used by the Linux kernel (this is a case where SCO is claiming ownership of the technology even though IBM owns the patent!)
• Raph Levien, of Advogato and Ghostscript fame, has licensed a whole series of patents he holds with respect to printing technology for use in GPLed code.

In all cases, these patents are free to use by any GPLed software, but not by non-copylefted free software.

• RIAA member
• GPL violator
• DMCA wielder
• Freedom hater
• DRM purveyor

Every day... I keep wondering, why do we have to even *think* about SCO until they come forward? The age old saying, "don't feed the trolls", comes to mind...

But for a bit more informativeness, I don't hear about the few software releases that have strong Caldera/SCO bonds, even as a new release, or a revived tool from way back then: OpenSLP, CSCOPE (gee, cSCOpe, advogators will kill me) and something similar (not trivial) which eludes my mind just now...

This is a reasonable assesment of the motivators in open source interop. We talked a little bit about this in part one of the article, last September.

Who are the beneficiaries of interop, and do these people matter to open source developers? This is indeed part of the challenge. The developers want their itches scratched, but we all want to see open source used in important places, like government administration. Those folks have itches too. Telling them they have to implement their needs really just sends them over to someone who will, for money of course.

Part of what we're trying to do with OSCOM is create some incentives and good reasons to work together. Thus, instead of pushing people towards interop, we're pulling.

1. Software patents are currently not allowed in Europe.

That means, that in Europe there is no Amazon One-Click patent, no SCO lawsuit, no Charles Northrup or this, this, another one from Bezos patenting web ads, a Bezos patent on discussing products online, software versioning, submarine patents, AOL...

2. This law will allow software patents if it passes.

3. It has a clause that would monitor the effects on OSS, and maybe, if negative effects are decided to be happening, try to limit those effects.

4. Some dude nobody's ever heard of claimed to represent OSS community and said it's a good idea.

5. Some other dude said the dude in 4 is full of it in a posting on his home page.

6. said posting got slashdotted

7. You are here.

"Certain software products, often known as ``filtering software'' or ``blocking software,'' restrict users from visiting certain internet websites. [...] Critics charge that some filtering programs unfairly block sites that do not contain undesirable material and therefore should not be filtered. [...] Several commenters assert that manufacturers of filtering software encrypt the lists naming the targeted sites and that they are not made available to others, including the operators of the targeted sites themselves. R56. These commenters assert that they have no alternative but to decrypt the encrypted lists in order to learn what websites are included in those lists. [...] Such acts of decryption would appear to violate 1201(a)(1) if it took effect without an exemption for these activities. [...] The case has been made for an exemption for compilations consisting of lists of websites blocked by filtering software applications."

"And the capabilities are far beyond what the PHP version had (although, this was in part due to the fact it's a newer version, but some things PHP's object model would not have been able to handle, such as the integration of any given object, and adding syntax for class and method metadata)."

I don't know exactly what you mean by this but PHP does support changing objects at runtime. For example you can do sort of a mixin-type-thing as illustrated here

advogato has a project page for it... which is odd since, obviously, the dog ain't no open-source puppy. there is no apparent attached project.

may i suggest the antique roadshow? that's where i got my copy of apple unix for the workgroup server 9150

Jorn at robotwisdom has been ranting about XML for a years now.

xmlsucks.org has a whole wiki of xml rants.

The Advogato has discussed xml evils at least once. There are more rants in the user journals if you've got time to search.

XML is just a text markup - a very verbose, flexible one at that. It's not much different than a good hammer. Great tool for pounding nails ... but not everything is a nail ...

Jorn at robotwisdom has been ranting about XML for a years now.

xmlsucks.org has a whole wiki of xml rants.

The Advogato has discussed xml evils at least once. There are more rants in the user journals if you've got time to search.

XML is just a text markup - a very verbose, flexible one at that. It's not much different than a good hammer. Great tool for pounding nails ... but not everything is a nail ...

Advogato article on this topic (with comments)

The only demonstrable example of a Microsoft patent that I can remember [relates to] CSS

Oh really? I remember a little fight about the ASF format.

Most of the obvious sites have already been posted, but I'd like to add two more to the list:

• Advogato.org - The diaries and rare new stories.
• Perl Monks - I've learned a lot from this site.

There has been a lot of discussion in the free software community lately about giving the GPL contractual terms to make it stronger. What do you think about this route?

Do you believe this claim is correct in all US jurisdictions, or do some state laws allow licenses like the GPL to be revoked by the copyright holder?

Here's a step-by-step walkthrough proving that a scumbag called Stephen Kapp wripped off some GPL'd code that I wrote.

You can see that the functionality is very similar, and that by using some simple tools to compare the binaries we can see they're the same on the inside. What we see here is mostly the names of functions which carry through from the source to the binary, to support debugging, run-time-linking, and similar things. The LKML post said that these strings were also found to be the same, and then Castle removed them, which is clearly evidence that they knew they'd been caught stealing.

Basically we're looking for patterns and similarities. Although somebody could (legally) write a program that had the same user interface, it's astronomically unlikely that they'd call their functions the same thing and have the exact same design.

Stephen Kapp crawled back under his rock once this was published. I expect Castle will do something similar: just continue to deny that it ever happened, but remove the code.

Similar things have happened to other major open-source projects. It hasn't been to court yet because, as far I know, every case has either been an honest misunderstanding, or an intentional violation but the perpetrator skulked away when challenged. I suppose in both cases it's not worth the FSF's time&money to take it further, but the drawback is that there's no clear example to others.

I really hope the FSF does help the copyright owners bring a lawsuit, it's time for a demonstration and I'd certainly throw in a hundred bucks to help fund it.

This isn't just a free software problem though: people who publish proprietary reusable code (development libraries, ...) have lots of trouble preventing copyright infringement. I don't think I've ever seen a Windows developer's machine that didn't have pirated, or at least unregistered-shareware, software.

Well, for those of us that got sold on the Slashdot article on the Creative Labs VoIP Blaster, I have good new! The diary for Damien Sandras (the author of the GnomeMeeting project) indicates that GnomeMeeting supports VoIPBlaster which provides GM access to the patented G.723.1 audio codec without having to buy a $100+ LinuxJack card. If only MicroTelco could convince SB to mass produce the VoIP Blaster again...

I'm not sure what, if any action, the FSF ever took. The POSE author's account is here. Since then, the released source to an older version of their modifications. On this page, Sony is taken to task for withholding source to their modifications until a "final" version--while distributing a not-so-final version.

Advogato's trust metric looks really interesting. Has it been tested to resist attacks in practice?

Daniel

Incidently, Guillimue (I'm sure I mispelled his name) Laurent, one of the GTKmm designers, got fed up with how difficult it was to cleanly do a GNOME C++ API (unlike GTK), and ended up moving to Qt.

You indeed mispelled my name :-). You also totally misunderstood the reasons why I left gtkmm. They are explained here, and they have nothing to do with the difficulty of wrapping Gnome as opposed to GTK. Ask Murray Cumming if wrapping GTK+ is easy :-).

That said, I'm indeed extremely happy to have moved to KDE/Qt, even if that wasn't the reason why I left. Sooner or later, it would have been anyway.

Because the GPL doesn't directly address patents by the first party (only patent restrictions placed upon licensees), I fear that a good lawyer could argue that license to use, modify and distribute a copyrighted document (the source code) doesn't take away from the patent rights of the first party.

rms has indicated that an FSF lawyer has opined that the GPL in its current form forces an implicit licensing of the patent, but there is no language in the GPL that makes this explicit. (Don't quote me the preamble; that's non-normative).

That's why some folks have proposed adding this language to the GPL.

Hard to say what will motivate a manager, but in the case of the folks using the tools on a regular basis, it can be effective to talk to them about the way you imagine bug tracking should work, the benefits they get from those practices, and then talk about how your current tool supports or inhibits those practices.

The first two steps, practices and their benefits, are something I've done a little research on, and put together a set of Defect Tracking Patterns that discuss how to work and the benefits of those practices in context.

Maybe if you can convince enough of the folks to want to adopt good practices, and that the current tool does not work well for those, you'll have some leverage with THe Boss.

"Imagine a cluster of these?" you say?

That's what I'm doing here.

You can find the full details of the testing announcement here and here

I suspect that I got lucky because my project has the magic term 'mp3' in it's title.

What I did was to start my project, post it to Freshmeat and SourceForge and make regular releases when new functionality was added - this is necessary to make your project known to random people.

All the time I was developing I was answering emails from users who needed help installing, or tweaking things, and that got fed back into future releases.

After a few releases it was getting obvious that one or two users were being helpful above and beyound that which I'd expect from a random user. These users were sending patches, playing around with the software in interesting new ways, and asking for very specific features which would be useful to other people - but which I'd not considered at all.

These were the people that ended up getting write access to my CVS repository, and these are now "my little helpers".

All of this happened naturally, the only things I really did were to publicise the project itself in my Advogato diary, freshmeat, and online. If people want software you want to make them find yours - then you want to have something which works well enough for them to use it. If people have a hard time using/installing/understanding your project they'll give up on it very quickly. (Sometimes they'll even refuse to use it again; thinking "Oh I tried that once - it sucked")

Finally I always asked for help on my projects page - making it clear to visitors that I'd be extremely greatful to recieve code, logos, themes, documentation, and suggestions from users. 99% of people won't give you anything - but the 1% really makes a big difference.

Three suggestions I'd make to writers of any new software:

• Think of a 'plugin'/'extension' system early on. If people can add bits to your software, (even if they keep it to themselves) they'll be more likely to like it, and work on it.
• Think about integrated bug reporting, like Emacs 'M-x report-bug', or Debians 'reportbug' package - that'll save you receiving email which says "Your software doesn't work" with no details.
• Documentation, documentation, documentation.

• Finally I guess this is a good point to say thank you to all the people that spared the time to contribute to my project - your contributions are much appreciated :)

I could technically see talk not being prior art.

What about the MIT/Athena Zephyr Project?

OSDir isn't owned by O'Reilly. It is a member of the O'Reilly Network, but it's Steve Mallet's baby. Steve has been thinking about SourceForge for over a year. (13 months, today, according to the link).

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guarantee, Goatse Merchandise, ... THE source for all your Goatse needs! ...
www.cafeshops.com/cp/store.aspx?s=goatsemerch - 15k - Cached - Similar pages

The Prime Number Shitting Goatse.cx Man Has Moved!
The link to the Prime Number Shitting Goatse.cx Man is outdated.
Please replace it with the code below. Inform the webmaster of ...
www.oswego.edu/~jpeck/prime/ - 2k - Dec. 11, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

Bob Goatse interview
Bob Goatse - the passage of the century. ... FC-uk: Hello? Hello? Mr Goatse? Bob Goatse:
(muffled) Where's the cellphone? I thought I heard it. FC-uk: Hello? ...
www.fc-uk.org.uk/goatse/ - 15k - Cached - Similar pages

Project info for Goatse
Project info for Goatse. Page created 5 Sep 2000 by TheGiver (Journeyer), last
modified 5 Sep 2000 by TheGiver (Journeyer). Homepage: http://goatse.cx. ...
www.advogato.org/proj/Goatse/ - 2k - Dec. 11, 2002 - Cached - Similar pages

Goatse
Goatse. ... However I had heard too many people talk about goatse.cx that
have never even seen the full photo gallery of the goatse guy. ...
www.hektik.org/various/various/goatse/ - 9k - Cached - Similar pages

DIRK [goatse.cx]
From to. goatse.cx is connected to because. Warning: mysql_fetch_array():
supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in