OSD Database Downloadable As XML

After taking some heat a few months ago for not having many products listed, the Open Source Directory has been plugging away. Steve Mallett writes: "We made the product database of Open-Source Directory downloadable in XML today. Announcement here at newsforge. We're hoping that people begin to use the data like google uses dmoz. More people see the data, which increases awareness of open-source which increases the database which gets more people to display the data etc, etc ... You get the point."

Providing a list of applications stable enough to recommend to non-gurus is a worthy endeavor, so it's great to see this project slowly becoming more useful. There are gaps to plug going forward, though. The default text strings can be ambiguous, and the information provided on individual projects doesn't always give much to go on. For instance, look at the Mosix page, where you'll find that "This product has no Latest version yet," "This product doesn't fix anything," and "This product is not like any other," but no email contact information for Mosix authors. Similarly ambiguous pages are provided for Gnucleus and OpenOffice.

I exchanged some email with Steve on the state of the entries in the database, and asked about how the missing information could be filled in. He told me that while project maintairers (and site administrators) are the only ones who can update entries, users can contact the administrators of individual projects directly through the OSD site to suggest changes or clarification.

"We're trying to make things easier for the maintainers. ... I think there is a serious lack of product maintainers to help authors," he said. To that end, Mallet may soon provide example projects for software authors to emulate, and is in the early stages of a unified project-listing tool which would update listings on various web sites. Given the number of sites that offer downloads or simply track various software projects, that could be a boon to developers.

Hopefully, this will turn into the sort of tool that you can show a boss or teacher to answer the bugaboo of Free / Open Source being unready for prime time (or just overwhelming and undifferentiated).

Comments

unified project-listing tool

[blab]

The "unified project-listing tool" refered too above is at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/trovesendtwo/ The idea is: you put the information for your product in a client & it updates SF/FM and or OSD at the same time without having to login & change all those listings. This is possible because, all these sites anyway, are based on loosely the same interface, data & category map. And yes, we could use some assistance with it!

-Steve Mallett of OSD