The Software Internet Database

Larry points out an interesting project called The Software Internet Database, the goal of which "is to compile the largest database of software titles and credits on the Internet. This includes all types of software such as operating systems, security, financial, mapping, browsers, video editing, games, word processing, and more. They have made a good start but still need more titles. Please take some time to submit missing titles so that they may compile the database faster." It would be informative to have a subway-map overhead view to know which of these are still available from their makers,have been folded into other products, or are now abandonware.

Comments

Not very complete

[trance9]

I tried a few searches for projects I've worked on. No matches. Then I tried some searches for more popular software packages.. No matches for things like "Linux" or "GCC". What's this doing on slashdot? Nice idea but it's got a way to go.

Either they'll get no funding...

[vidarlo]

...or it will be spamridden. We have tucows, which was useable, but only had windows software. We have freshmeat, which is useable, but mostly free software. We have sourceforge, which hosts free software. Point is, all those software catalogs is either narrow in scope, requires registration from the individual software project, is spam ridden, or disappears.

And how would you rate programs? Ensure that links works? Whom should you credit for the programs? What if the homepage moves? Sounds like a lot of if's without good answers.

And if they are submission-based, how many will bother? How many dupes will there be? Is MS Office 2003 seperate program from MS Office 2004 for MAC? Is Firefox and mozilla discrete apps? What about the different parts of the KDE suite?

Not ready for prime time

[Malfourmed]

The idea is a good one (though I wouldn't be surprised if there were similar projects out there already) but IMO the site is some way from having made even "a good start".

For instance there are only 83 titles in the database. And while this deficiency can be addressed by people contributing data there are design choices which I find puzzling. For instance, How is Bill Gates' height relevant to the purpose of the project? And would it not be an idea to associate names with titles via a "role", rather than just a credit? Ie, I'd be interested to know of the 200 people who worked on, say, Starcraft, who was the producer, the artist, the game designer, the beta tester etc. As far as I can tell there is no way of identifying this at present.

IMDb

[Anonymous Coward]

Does everyone remembers when IMDb was totally free and now only paid members can comments? Such community sites tend to turn up their nose on the community which built it.

Success?

[spykemail]

For this to be successful they need to develop a user friendly interface and attract non-technical users. This could easily become the IMDB for software IF it's made for everyone, not just us geeks.

Where's the Metadata ?

[CaptSolo]

There are already many sites like that out there already. What they could differ in is - provide some metadata about these software titles in machine-readable form.

There is now DOAP (description of a project) - a vocabulary / schema that allows to mark up such information.

It would be much more fun to have machine-readable links between different titles that forked one from another, etc. Uses can be starting from "maps" of software evolution mentioned in above and to other uses yet to be imagined. (Note: I do not know if DOAP allows to describe such parent-child relationships between software projects, but if such a property is needed I am sure someone will invent it).

P.S. Having information about abandonware would also be useful - but mainly if they'd also provide downloads and source code (where available). Although I doubt anyone will go to such extent to preserve abandonware.