How To Tell Open-Source Winners From Losers

An anonymous reader writes "There are 139,834 open-source projects under way on SourceForge. IWeek wonders which projects will make lasting contributions, and which will fizzle. Sure, Linux, Apache, and MySQL are winners, but what about OpenVista, FLOSSmole, and Hyperic HQ? What's your list of open-source winners and losers?"

Comments

I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a program

[Anonymous Coward]

This is backwards, I hear about a program, then I go look for it on Sourceforge. Who has time to sift through 100,000 hobby projects? Let others discover and bring the good ones to light. That is what true open source is all about.

Frozen-bubble

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Uh-oh!

Yeah.

Frozen.

Bubble.

I only play so I can listen to the lyrics.

Re:Frozen-bubble

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

(Score:-1, Offtopic)

Clearly, the mods have never played frozen-bubble. That's probably a good thing, since it's a huge sink of time.

/me goes back to playing frozen-bubble.

the winners are ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Those who don't want to reinvent the wheel.

Photo display, like Gallery
Forums , like phpBB

Re:the winners are ...

[slackmaster2000]

phpBB is a good candidate because it's popular, and in that regards is definitely successful. In my opinion it's pretty shoddy software that's difficult to manage, slow, has a poor stock featureset, and is a big flaming target in terms of security (whether the security problems are the fault of the developers or simply the result of its popularity can be argued). Although many years ago I recommended it highly, I stopped about two years ago, especially to my own web hosting customers...there were just too many script-kiddie security problems that required "under the hood" patching which was a problem worsened by the need to install 3rd party patches to provide features that everyone at the time expected (file uploading, for instance).

Version 3 appears to be right around the corner. I'm mildly interested to see if it's caught up to other packages like SMF. (unfortunately SMF isn't GPL, but its license isn't horribly restrictive. The code is better and lighter than phpbb 2.X IMHO as well)

Re:the winners are ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not so sure I'd call phpBB a winner. Have you ever used it? or worse, dug through the source code?

Re:the winners are ...

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion it's pretty shoddy software that's difficult to manage, slow, has a poor stock featureset, and is a big flaming target in terms of security (whether the security problems are the fault of the developers or simply the result of its popularity can be argued). You just described nearly every php-based app. Sure there is some excellent php code out there, but overall it's best to avoid like the plague.

This isn't meant to be a troll, just my observation. Every time I get someone telling me about some "cool" php app a look at it's security list (sql injection exploit after sql inject exploit..) or the code it self (it's rare when I can spend more than 5 minutes reading it without finding a few exploits), I end up running away from it.

It's a real shame, as PHP is actually a nice language. They just make it very easy to write insecure code.

Re:the winners are ...

[Anonymous Coward]

whether the security problems are the fault of the developers or simply the result of its popularity can be argued

Uhm, "popularity" doesn't create security holes. Incompetent programmers do.

I have no problem calling phpBB utter GARBAGE in terms of code quality. Just look through the code sometimes. It looks exactly like code I wrote in high school, where I didn't know exactly how to do things, I would just hammer stuff until it worked and then I was afraid to touch it.

Some stuff that popped out at me:

"Clean" vs. "unclean" variables look exactly the same (variables that contain dangerous unwashed data from the outside world should LOOK different). Variables are cleaned in arbitrary places within functions, rather than at the BEGINNING. Functions go on forever, sometimes the indenting is 10 levels deep. No effort is made to wrap code at 80 or 100 or any number of columns, making it hard to read. Logic is duplicated in many places, probably via cut/paste/modify. There's isn't a SINGLE place in the code where you can, say, "delete a post" or "create a post". The logic is spread all over, making it difficult to customize. The database schema uses no foreign keys, giving you no clue about the meaning of the data (is it legal to have a "foo" without a "bar", if not, why does it allow it?).

The whole thing is basically a clusterfuck and every time a client asks for it, the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Unfortunately, I have NO IDEA what else is out there to replace it with, so I just stick it in a freebsd jail and hope for the best. I have scattered the code with all kinds of tricks and traps to detect hacking attempts which has helped to a certain extent.

Sometimes, open source programmers need to drop the wishy-washy "best tool for the job, I'm okay, you're okay, no such thing as badly written software" attitude and just call some things what they are: CRAP.

Re:the winners are ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole thing is basically a clusterfuck and every time a client asks for it, the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Unfortunately, I have NO IDEA what else is out there to replace it with, so I just stick it in a freebsd jail and hope for the best. I have scattered the code with all kinds of tricks and traps to detect hacking attempts which has helped to a certain extent. What I do for php apps that I must run is to stick them in a stripped down and heavily locked down custom built VM (Xen). I keep any filesystem read only that's possible (enforced through Xen). I use mod_security and Suhosin (new hardened php). I also disable every php feature I can possibly get away with and turn on safe mode. If it uses a database (most do, and rather poorly (foreign keys exist for a fscking reason!)), I make automated backups every thirty minutes. SQL injection exploits are inevitable in PHP apps.

Since I mostly do virtual hosts, I keep a parent NetBSD (in Xen) apache server (severely locked down) in running mod_proxy and have that send traffic to the diffent vms.

PHP really needs a redesign. It's a nice language (good OO in 5, awesome templating with Smarty*, etc). It really should be written in a way so that the n00bs can't easily write horribly insecure code.

* Does anyone know of an equivalent library in Java? Smarty is the reason I still do heavy amounts of work in PHP (with obsessive data checking). If I could find something that offers the same amount of power while continuing to allow me to keep a complete separation of the logic and presentation, I'd switch that minute.

Re:the winners are ...

[slackmaster2000]

Check into Simple Machines Forums (SMF). I haven't dug into it much, but by comparison, the code is a breath of fresh air... of course it could turn out to be shit as well.

Re:the winners are ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The database schema uses no foreign keys, giving you no clue about the meaning of the data

that's a problem with MySQL. Foreign keys are planned for the next release, but considering that evey $5 a month virtual hosting service still uses MySQL 4.0.x and PHP 4.x, they won't be used for a long time.

Hint

[Pxtl]

If it's an MMORPG that 12 people on the project who've been working on it for about a year, and they've got a small stack of concept art and some story documentation to show for it, it's probably a loser.

Fairly easy

[$RANDOMLUSER]

IBM: Open Source Winners
SCO: Open Source Losers

minix

[circletimessquare]

minix has always been intriguing

OpenVista?

[Illbay]

Sheesh. There's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Re:OpenVista?

[AKAImBatman]

VistA is a medical tracking system. OpenVistA is an OSS implementation.

Re:OpenVista?

[sconeu]

And it's actually OpenVistA. Note the trailing upper case.

1. It's from the US.gov
2. It's been around since 2003.

Re:OpenVista?

[Anonymous Coward]

and the original VistA was released by veteran's affairs in '96, predating that other vista by quite some time.
http://www.va.gov/vista_monograph/

Re:OpenVista?

[porkrind]

Heh... "VistA" was around long before Windows Vista was a twinkle in Monkey Boy's eye.

-John Mark
Hyperic Community Outreach

Re:OpenVista?

[sconeu]

Yeah, I made a mistake. OpenVista is an OSS version of the US.gov VistA.

Re:OpenVista?

[jez9999]

And it's actually OpenVistA. Note the trailing upper case.

Erm, except that its SourceForge page says that it's OpenVista.

roll the games together

[192939495969798999]

I've always thought there should be a borg-like game project to roll all the unfinished games into one big ball and work out the common elements into a single game engine, then just farm out the artwork,etc. back to the individual project holders. It could be way easier to generate a lot of interesting games that way.

Re:roll the games together

[Chyeld]

and so the world of TRON was born...

Re:roll the games together

[Junior J. Junior III]

Wouldn't this just make every single game feel and play like every other? Total boredom. I'd like this about as much as I would like 64,000 ugly skins for my favorite media player app.

Re:roll the games together

[Jorrit]

It is not the game engine that defines the feel of art and play of a game. The artwork and the game logic (which isn't part of the game engine but written on top of the game engine) are what makes a game unique. And you can make many unique games with the same game engine. Saying that one game engine makes all games look alike is like saying that all games using Direct3D look alike.

Greetings,

Re:roll the games together

[Sneftel]

Will the ball of unfinished games be able to roll through the tubes of the internet?

Re:roll the games together

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been done. It's called Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:roll the games together

[ZorbaTHut]

There is. It's called SDL and OpenGL. Everything else is game-specific.

Of course, some families of games are closer than other - you could probably make one engine for all first-person shooters, one engine for all MMORPGs, etc. But if you want one engine for everything, we're already as close as we're going to get.

Re:roll the games together

[poopie]

... well at least until your katamari gets too big for the tubes. Then you need to go outside the tubes and roll up cars and buildings.

Re:roll the games together

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of games, bzflag is a good example of succesfull open source projects.

Re:roll the games together

[nuzak]

I've always thought there should be a borg-like game project to roll all the unfinished games into one big ball and work out the common elements into a single game engine, then just farm out the artwork,etc. back to the individual project holders. It could be way easier to generate a lot of interesting games that way.

If you rolled enough of these projects up, you'd end up creating a critical mass of incompetence. The bogon cascade alone could annihilate any project that got near it.

"Adding more programmers to a late project makes it later." -- Fred Brooks

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

I'm not sure if you are joking or not, so...

Here is a partial list of successful free software projects not on Sourceforge:

• Linux
• Apache
• Python
• Ruby (off and on Rails)
• PostgreSQL
• Most of GNU
• *BSD

A better place to look for successful free software projects is http://packages.debian.org/.

Re:The Losers:

[halivar]

Well, seeing as how you're posting on the INTERNET, I'd say this places you solidly in the "loser" category, by your definition.

Enjoy your open-source.

Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[Richard Steiner]

I don't care so much if a program is popular. I'm more interested in whether or not a program is actually USEFUL to me. :-) Some of the open source stuff I love is quite unpopular, but I don't care because it does what I want in the way I want it done.

That's one of the beauties of open source -- "winning" doesn't always matter.

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[El Nigromante]

I agree with this one.

In fact, many winners have grown based on the way opened by forgotten losers.

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[jellomizer]

You are thinking in terms of getting a program and using it yourself, for your own setup. If you are working in a larger business environment this may not hold useful.

Leaving out any of the stupid Political how Bosses are stupid and stuff here are some facts why you should be more interested in more Successful projects.

Training Costs: Training costs are more then paying an expert to tell the people how to use the product during a meeting. It is the downtime people suffer from the learning curve on the product. Say it is an easy to use App and it takes a company of 100 employees only 15 Minutes to learn and get useful. Assuming an average wage of $15.00 an hour That is about $300 (The actual multiplication is more but we can assume that they can make up some of the loss time that day) So for a Very Simple application that is very easy to use we have spent enough money to Pay a $15.00 hour employee for 1/2 a week. As a program grows in complexity the numbers a higher, and if the CEO needs to use this app it can get expensive quickly. If you use a more popular application there are chances that there will be more people who already know the product and less training expenses.

Dynamic Needs: Companies needs are rarely static, and they are often the same changes that happen with other companies. Using a more Active and Popular tool increases the chances that the product will keep up with the needs.

Security: One lonely programmer checking for security or a large team checking and fixing security. Which do you prefer.

Finding the Product: If you are trying to find a product that meets your needs you will normally find the more popular product first then then other guys later. So it comes up with how much time/money are you willing to spend to find that needle in the haystack that will work perfectly with you. Or the more popular app is good enough and will get the job done.

Support: If there is a problem what is the base you can turn to. If the project is too unpopular then the only guy you can contact is the developer, and if he is tired explaining the products he just may not talk to you. For more popular products there is a community you can turn to get support on your problems.

Now for some of the PHB problems.

Unknown Name: MySQL, Linux, Apache They get some coverage in the non-tech rags. If it is to remote then the Boss will not want to try it because they haven't heard from anyone else professionally on how well it works or not. As well articles stating its success if the project fails.

What if the project stops: What if the project just stops. Who will keep the product alive. Trusting a Company Critical Application so a program that may day doesn't sound good to me.

If this doesn't work who to blame: if the S**T hits the fan fingers will be pointed and if the project isn't popular enough it will go under the radar and toward the person who implemented it or approved the implementation. Saying it is Linux or Microsoft fault will ease the blame towards the individuals because the product has been used sucessfuly elsewhere. But if was GNUseless then You will get the blame.

Sure for personal use you can use whatever application you like. I myself for text editing I prefer JED not as much Vi or Emacs. As well as some other less used tools. But if I need to implement on a company bases even for a very small company going with larger names actually does make it easier to get it approved and implemented.

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[Richard Steiner]

You are thinking in terms of getting a program and using it yourself, for your own setup. If you are working in a larger business environment this may not hold useful.

Just to clarify: I'm also thinking in terms of getting a program, using it myself, and making general recommendations to others in a corporate environment where I don't have root access and the sysadmins will only install "company approved" software, meaning I'm on my own to find things not on the relatively short Approved List.

Many of your points simply don't apply to me, since I don't have to "sell" the software I use to some fictional set of Powers That Be. I install it, I use it in my own context on the various DEV machines on the LAN, and the risks that come with the usage are all mine.

Other programmers who follow my recommendations may or may not assume the same risk, as I have taken it upon myself to provide direct local support for some of the stuff for which I have soutce code. It varies with each program and with each person, though.

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[digitalunity]

Several comments.

OOSS applications are not always more secure than closed source programs. I think a lot of this depends on the type of application as well as the popularity of the application. An OSS program that isn't very popular will have few developers working on it. The greater security availabel in Linux is only present because of the number of people reviewing the source; with a small program maybe there's only a few people developing it. One thing is nice however.. a lot of the less popular applications have less features than their closed source counterparts and thus have less attack vectors.

What if the project stops: What if the project just stops. Who will keep the product alive. Trusting a Company Critical Application so a program that may day doesn't sound good to me.

This is a toss up. With closed source, the reverse is true also. What if the company stops producing, developing or supporting your Company Critical Application(R)? You have no options except to migrate to another solution. You could ask the copyright holder if you can have the source, but most companies will decline citing (insert one: IP concern, security, diluted financial value of the product, etc). If a company has the technical resources and had been relying on an OSS solution, at least they have the source code as a clutch to get them through until a migration is convenient. If it turns out that the program is easily extensible, they may even keep an internal fork that they can continue to develop without the hassle of keeping their changes open sourced.

For a small business, this is an absolute non-option. They don't have the resources and losing a primary application on which your business is founded can be a business killer. OSS has it's advantages for small business however, including reduced cost over time. Like anything, OSS isn't right for everyone. Any successful business owner would complete a risk-tolerance assesment to determine what solution has acceptable features, security risk, cost(initial and over time).

Sadly, many times the instability and uncertainty of OSS applications' future makes small businesses choose closed source. It's funny though that for the very reason they choose closed source applications, they should choose open source: You never know when Company X will discontinue Product Y and leave you stranded. I would bet often times this is based on inaccurate and incomplete information. How do you tell the small businesses though that they don't need to pay the Redmond rent to be successful?

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[bplipschitz]

I don't care so much if a program is popular. I'm more interested in whether or not a program is actually USEFUL to me. :-) Some of the open source stuff I love is quite unpopular, but I don't care because it does what I want in the way I want it done.

Which is great until the project goes tits up, and is removed from ports trees, security updates and such, and then you have to go looking again. It would be nice to find a winner the first time out.

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[Eskarel]

True, closed source applications can die(or more likely move onto a new non compatible version), but close source applications die in different ways than open source ones.

Closed source applications die because they are unprofitable, or because the company that makes them tanked for some other reason. This is a problem, particularly with smaller applications, but a good product worth paying for is usually profitable, and most large companies don't tank, and if they do their profitable assets are bought by someone else. Companies rarely decide to stop making a profitable product simply because they don't want to make it anymore, and if a product goes from profitable to unprofitable it's probably becauses there's something else most of the market has switched to and you probably want to as well.

Open source developers on the other hand, can stop working on a project for a whole host of reasons. The lead developers could become bored with the project(this happens a lot with software for which all the "cool" parts are already done. They could have a change in lifestyle which decreases the time they have available to the project(ie getting married, having a kid, etc). They could be in an accident.

Companies are relatively stable, and they're motivated by money, so long as the money flows the product flows, whether it's boring or not. Open Source, particularly much smaller products, is much more fickle. The fact that you have the source available afterwards is really rather immaterial, since if the company had sufficient development staff to maintain the software they would have written it, or forked it themselves.

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[Watson Ladd]

You just hit the nail on the head as to a why software sucks. Managers want someone to blame when something goes wrong. They don't care about if it goes wrong.

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a toss up. With closed source, the reverse is true also. What if the company stops producing, developing or supporting your Company Critical Application(R)? You have no options except to migrate to another solution.

Not true! You could also hire a small army of consultants to try to write adapters and workarounds for interfacing to the now-legacy application, waste a small fortune on lawyers to try to get them to just recompile the old thing with one little stinking security fix, and insist the whole time that it would be more expensive to switch to a new database that doesn't happen to be abandonware.

Uh, that's just my guess, though.

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[belmolis]

How about Tcl/TK, with the ActiveState IDE and development kit, or one of the several FOSS IDEs? I don't see why this would be any harder than Visual Basic, the language is nicer. The language itself is free, and you can get some pretty good tools for free, or buy the commercial ones for not all that much.

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[kiddygrinder]

I'd disagree with this one, if you find an open source project that has progressed to the point of it actually being a useful application it's very likely to be interesting to at least a few developers which will in turn make it's likelyhood of "boredom death" (to pull a phrase out of my ass) very unlikely. Whereas a thousands of smaller companies create millions of tiny apps that fill a niche and become useful very quickly, are picked up by a company that needs that niche filled, followed by the developing company tanking/being aquired/owners giving up and moving on to greener pastures. In a way the fact that it is quite rare that an oss project "makes it" and becomes useful is a pretty good guarantee that it will continue to be developed, the same way that a larger company guarantees to a degree continuing support for your app.

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[Richard Steiner]

If I have the source to start with, and if it's a program I depend on, I'll usually try to get it to build myself at that point.

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[Richard Steiner]

The elephant in the room is that there are still no programming tools that a gifted amateur can use.

That depends on the platform you're talking about. OS/2, for example, comes with REXX as its main bundled scripting language, and it's a very good scripting language (IMO) for beginning coders to learn with. It also has a lot of third-party libraries and such, and it is cross-platform to a certain extent. I wish more Linux distros would include REXX, actually. It's a good language.

That said, it *does* seem a lot harder to learn programming these days compared to when I was learning (and cutting my teeth on Integer BASIC on the Apple II) back in the late 70's.

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[Eskarel]

I know this isn't a production app, but XMMS is dead and it's what you'd call a "major" project. That's just one I can think of off the top of my head.

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[Tanuki64]

OOSS applications are not always more secure than closed source programs. I think a lot of this depends on the type of application as well as the popularity of the application

I am not 100% sure, whether I agree or disagree here. Of course, if you mean code quality, you are right. Open source is not better just because it is open. All kind of people can write open source, so there exists every possible skill level. Open source has no advantage here.

But, and I think this is important, even if there are no 1000 eyes, which look at the code as often claimed. And even if there are not 1000 hands, which meticulously remove every bug they find, open source nevertheless has a very important security advantage: It is open.

Every open source programmer knows of the possibility that someone might go through his code, Therefore I really doubt that many of them dare to hide evil stuff like backdoors of phone home routines in their code.

Open source might not protect much from bad code, but it surely does a good job to protect users from evil intent.

So it seems, I tend more to 'OS is more secure'. :-)

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[kiddygrinder]

Oh I absolutely acknowledge that major os projects have died, i'd be interested in hearing about others that have in fact. However i'd say XMMS is a pretty bad example, it was forked twice, once to BMP which was forked again to become audacious... both projects are now in the process of killing off all of the legacy code from XMMS, but i don't think that's really that relevent, as at the root of it, XMMS spawned 2 projects to fill the void of it's passing. It's actually a pretty good ( but mostly irrelevent, it is a music player after all, you can't turn around without some uni student cranking one out) example of how resilient oss can be. That's just my opinion anyways... it's not like i'm making any decisions as to which software our company is going with.

Re:Anything I can benefit from is a "winner"...

[jellomizer]

Well like all of us. At the end of the day they all still want to keep their jobs. We are in a culture that Severely Punishes Failures and mildly rewards success.
If your program has been working great for years then finally after a decade it has a problem, you will look bad because your product failed after a decade of perfect usage. You do not get rewarded for having you program work fine for years. So if you could point to a consultant, 3rd party manufacture for the problem then you get off the hook, even if the product fails once a week

Jakarta

[bckrispi]

In the Java world, anything released by the Apache Jakarta project is usally a winner.

Re:Jakarta

[benjfowler]

While there *are* a large proportion of successful projects in large open source incubator sites like the Apache Jakarta project or Tigris and the like, I doubt merely arranging for having a piece of software adopted under the Apache Jakarta umbrella is a guarantee that it'll be an open source smash hit. It's not unusual for private companies to dump their old projects as open source, particularly on a big incubator, hoping that they'll take off by themselves. It doesn't always happen. Just count the number of XML binding frameworks on the Jakarta site, for instance. I have no hard numbers, but I'll bet that half this stuff barely gets used.

For every Velocity and Subversion out there, there's a ton of projects out there that are sadly abandoned or ignored, either because they never made the cut in the first place, they have critical flaws which prevent them from being adopted, or they're made obsolete. What happened to Scarab, for instance? Even now, a lot of people I know use Bugzilla (free, crappy, but works), and JIRA (non-free but excellent if you have the budget for a license).

Having a browse through these incubator sites makes for interesting archaeology though. A current Java server-side developer might wince when looking through some of the stuff that's still up there, especially when other people have come up with better ways of doing things, e.g. Spring and WebWork than the older and clunkier projects that occasionally still find their homes on these sites.

Having a bunch of old and abandoned projects doesn't really matter for these guys; their large number of big hits more than makes up for the also-rans.

Re:Jakarta

[cibyr]

*shudders*

I had an experience with Java Server Faces a few weeks ago. As much as it seems like a cool idea, sometimes objects are *not* the answer. The problem I had to solve would have been much easier with a few lines of perl, instead of a bunch of java beans with a zillion properties and (IMHO) a huge dirty hack to get around the (completely artificial) limitation that you can't pass arguments to methods you call from a page.

Re:Jakarta

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? I'm sure I recently read a long, frustrated and entertaining rant about "Jakarta commons logging" (?) being a steaming pile of shit. Never used it myself but it clearly got some blogger riled.

Re:Jakarta

[bckrispi]

Hey, don't blame Jakarta for JSF. That's a Sun Microsystems specification. :)

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[someone1234]

I go to Sourceforge when i need a kind of program, and use their search facilities to find it. Or use google, with site:sourceforge.net Only if i don't find it there, i look elsewhere.

How to tell?

[bendodge]

1. Does it have a good plan and some goals
2. Is it something someone needs? (Edison and the electric voting machine...)
3. Can it be to kept current and out of obsoletion with reasonable effort?

Other than that, only time will tell.

Re:How to tell?

[Doctor Crumb]

4) Have they actually released source code?

I'm constantly amazed by the number of projects on sourceforge with nothing to show but vague descriptions and good intentions.

Re:How to tell?

[timeOday]

I'm constantly amazed by the number of projects on sourceforge with nothing to show but vague descriptions and good intentions.

Why? What's the harm? It's not hard to make a sourceforge page, nor should it be. I don't think the number of crappy projects on sourceforge proves anything about anything, except that it's not hard to start a project on sourceforge. Good.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[LordPhantom]

Um. Right. So you're telling me you've never thought "Gosh, if only I had a program/code that would do X!" and gone looking for it?

I'll ignore the obvious concern that if nobody went looking for OSS software on sites like SF, people wouldn't hear about great ones as easily.

Easy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Winners:

root@localhost>./configure %% make && make install
root@localhost>
(program/library/whatever works)

Losers:

root@localhost>./configure %% make && make install
error: unable to find . You need to install library.
root@localhost>rm -rf ./*
root@localhost>

Re:Easy!

[lahvak]

Losers: whoever runs "configure" as root.

Re:Easy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Losers: whoever run "configure" and "make" as root.

Re:Easy!

[lahvak]

Sure, but AFAIK pretty much any unix or unix like system by default assumes that you will run "make install" as root. While I was thinking several times about chowning the entire /usr/local tree to a special user and running "make install" as that user rather than root, it would still not prevent everything, and the process just seemed as too much of a PITA for a low profile home system.

What other options are there? Are there any systems that do something like that by default?

Re:Easy!

[Lost Race]

Create a new user with UID=0 and GID=0. Now you can install software without being root. Problem solved!

Re:Easy!

[mcrbids]

Losers: whoever runs "configure" as root.

Losers: whoever thinks it makes a difference what user you run "configure" as without realizing that running "make install" as anybody other than root is pretty pointless.

Re:Easy!

[edunbar93]

Next you're going to tell me that I should never run any compiled program as root (and most servers need to start as root even if they run as another user) unless you've checked over every line of that software for backdoors and security vulnerabilities yourself. Because you know, it's just as easy for the developer of said software (or a third party attacker!) to insert a backdoor or exploit into fastlib.c as it is to insert one into Makefile. And while we're at it, you should never run ls, mv, cp, df, du, dd, who, ps, cc, rm, chmod, mkdir, chown, or passwd as root, because the system might have been compromised and they might be trojans. Or better yet, since systems administrators cause 95% of all systems failures, just change the root password to THs7h^%$1LKqD&!, and burn the post-it it was written on before reading it. And then shoot the systems administrator and his entire family, just in case he remembered it and accidentally blurted it out in his sleep.

Or, you can accept a little risk somewhere along the way and actually get some fucking work done.

Re:Easy!

[nbritton]

"Losers: whoever runs "configure" as root."

Losers: Whoever runs configure.

Winners: "make install clean", go...
Why make it more complex then needed?... The only thing it does is make the programmer look like a retard.

Re:Easy!

[piranha(jpl)]

This comment makes me sad. What you need is package management.

There are times you'll want to compile from source. A minor price to pay is to ensure you have supporting libraries in place.

What are the alternatives?

• Software developer writes not only the software to solve the problem they're interested in—they have to write other supporting code that duplicates the functionality of existing libraries. This unnecessarily duplicates work. If you have n applications implementing some feature that could have been solved by one library, you get:
  • n different implementations, with n times the security flaws and other bugs than one would have if a single common library were written.
  • n "90%" solutions, rather than 1 "100%" solution—each implementation will only go so far as to support the minimum necessary for the original application. A common library can focus on doing it once, the right way, the general way.
  • About n*0.9-1 additional work expended than would be required for a common library. This depletes energy that could be devoted toward the interesting application you wish to compile.
• Software developer bundles all supporting libraries with application, at the source level.
  • Bugs discovered in the source application will need to be fixed in each bundling application by the developers that maintain the bundling applications, instead of once by software distributors (e.g. Linux distributions). Sometimes this may be easy on a per-case basis. Other times, a copy of the bundled library may be highly customized to the application (effectively a fork).
    • This also applies to security problems: c.f. zlib
  • Code size is increased. (This is usually a minor problem.)

Which of these has the acceptable set of trade-offs to you? And, do you write software?

Re:Easy!

[lahvak]

First, as other pointed out, when creating packages, you don't have to run make install as root. Second, checking a makefile is usually much easier than checking a configure script. If I wanted to hide some nasty code, configure script is one of the easiest places to put it.

Re:Easy!

[caluml]

It doesn't really matter if you're going to run "make install" as root though, does it.

Re:Easy!

[lahvak]

It does. First, it is much easier to check a makefile for suspicious code than a configure script. Second, you can always run make -n install to see what is going to happen. Good luck trying to figure out what exactly is your typical configure script going to do. There is no reason you cannot run configure && make as regular user, and then switch to root and run make install, after making sure nothing suspicious is going to happen. If I install software from untrusted sources (something I just heard of on freshmeat and downloaded from some random website), that's what I do. Running configure as root is unnecessry and IMHO it is asking for trouble.

Re:Easy!

[lahvak]

I usually don't download mu server software, important system utilities and syatem libraries from random sites on the net. But when you are installing a piece of software you just saw on freshmeat and thought it looked useful, running configure as root is just asking for it. Besides, there is absolutely no reason for it. You don't get any advantage by it, except perhaps for saving few keystrokes. IMHO it is just a very bad habit.

Re:Easy!

[Raideen]

It's been a long time since I've actually had to compile an app. However, when I used to do that, the applications that I've used would have configure scripts that would see that I wasn't root and would setup the Makefile to install into my home directory. There was no need to run anything as root.

Re:Easy!

[pclminion]

Nice way of taking the argument to a ridiculous extreme. How hard is it really to simply not run configure as root? Why do anything as root that doesn't HAVE to be done as root? That's really the only point here.

Clarification

[Bogtha]

One of the PostgreSQL developers quoted in the article feels this article is inaccurate in some ways.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a partial list of successful free software projects not on Sourceforge:

No, that's basically it. When it comes to server software, interpreted languages, a couple of RDMSs, browsers, and toolkits, Sourceforge is GREAT!

I was looking for some accounting/bookkeeping software and CRM software on Sourceforge for running my non-IT business and I found it to be incredibly lacking. Most of the projects were in the Alpha stages, if that, and many were just starting up. I need software now. I don't have time to contribute my very rusty programming skills either. So, I had to get a commercial package...that's me.

A friend of mine who runs a blog and a comment site much like this one (political) was using some F/OSS blogging comment posting software. He isn't technical and needed support which was lacking in the F/OSS version of the software he was using. He can't afford to hire a F/OSS developer. So he purchased a commercial application for around $300.00 that meets all of his needs.

Now, as someone who reads Slashdot everyday, I can assure all of you that I mentioned EVERYTHING that you folks are about to mention to me. He wasn't interested. He NEEDED a piece of software that worked and worked now - no Beta, no Alpha - A RELEASED VERSION of software and someone who will fix his problems.

I just committed heresy here on Slashdot and I'm waiting for the wips and chains.

Turning loosers into winners?

[the_arrow]

From TFA:

Corporate developers and other IT professionals must get better at divining the winners and ignoring the losers. The wrong picks can lead companies down a rat hole of support problems and obsolete software.

Maybe so, but some projects may turn out to be loosers just because they didn't get picked up by some company wanting to use it.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, right. What the world needs is a place that one could ask "I want the best , I don't want to d/l and compile/fix/compile/test/delete a bunch to find some gem." There used to be Tucows for windows, where it was easy to find the best of the many programs. May be the best one could hope for is Oreilly or someone to publish reviews and top 10 lists of OpenSource projects.

In Soviet Russia...

[null etc.]

...source opens you!

Re:In Soviet Russia...

[Anonymous Coward]

you are really very funny.
ha ha ha ha.
ha.

Look at the Hype

[RAMMS EIN]

It's the same as with everything: you can't tell which products are going to win by looking at the projects. Look at the hype, instead. If the media are abuzz with the product, it's probably a winner. If a product can't seem to capture the media attention, even after reaching a usable state, it will not be more than a fringe player. If the project site, documentation, code, etc. is so messy you can't make sense of it, the product will probably fail.

Disclaimer: this is just my rule of thumb. There's no silver bullet. If I _really_ knew how to predict these things, I'd be a millionaire (and not in Romanian Lei).

Re:Look at the Hype

[shmlco]

And if the project "team" is one individual who hasn't posted anything new in six months...

Proably could eliminate 70-80% of the projects on SF with this one criteria.

Re:Look at the Hype

[Gerald]

Wireshark (formerly Ethereal) has been pretty popular despite getting very little coverage from the industry trade press.

Re:Look at the Hype

[belmolis]

This is true if the project is still incomplete or if it depends on other projects that are constantly changing. There are, however, projects that are complete and have had the bugs worked out. They may be updated only when someone finds a bug or something breaks because of a change in something they depend on. In such cases, no activity for months at a time is not a danger sign. I've got projects like that myself. Take my color picker. Okay, it isn't Linux or Apache, but it does what it was intended to do and has no known bugs. At some point I might add a feature or a translation, but unless something comes up, there is no need to do anything to it. The fact that the last release was nine months ago doesn't mean that it has been abandoned or that anything is wrong with it.

SourceForge isn't the only show in town...

[jklappenbach]

While projects like Azureus, Gimp, and countless others have originated or flourished in some form on SourceForge, far more telling cases for the power of open source are the repositories like the Apache Software Foundation. While most Apache projects are based on Java, it's impact on the open source community (and software in general) can't be overstated.

That aside, it's really hard to classify open source projects from the perspective of applications. Many of the projects are utilities, satisfying a narrow solution like reporting, connectivity, adaptation, etc. These types of releases will never see broad interest from end users, but will instead find their niche within the development community.

But, if the real focus is what open source has to offer the end user, SourceForge provides ranking for each of the projects. The higher the rank, the more activity the project has enjoyed, the more downloads that have been made. It's a fairly reliable indicator on the success of the project.

-jjk

Same rules as real life..

[digitalderbs]

The same rules apply to open source as they do in real life.. it's not about quality necessarily. To quote Sean Connery in The Rock,

Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.

The prom queen, in this case, is your PC.

Re:Same rules as real life..

[msuzio]

| Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.

My PC prefers to be lovingly wooed, not fucked like a cheap two-dollar whore. That, to me, is the difference between Microsoft and Linux. It's like the sleazy CEO from Seattle who just wants an H&D versus the sophisticated Finnish fellow who loves jazz music and art films.

My PC needs more than a one-night stand, dammit!

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[drinkypoo]

I prefer freshmeat.net. They do have non-OSS stuff but you can search by license type. It keeps you updated, it has download and homepage links for most projects, and people can rate things, the latter of which is the interesting part.

benevolent dictators

[BertieBaggio]

FTFA:

MySQL, Linux, and other successful open source projects all have this in common: a Linus Torvalds sort of figure, a benevolent dictator with the humility to see the value in other people's work. [...] At Samba, founded in 1992 to provide file and print capabilities across Windows, Unix, and Linux, it's the diplomatic yet decisive Jeremy Allison.

I'd add that a good characteristic is that these 'benevolent dictators' have a good habit of speaking out on matters of importance. For LT, it is about GPL v3 - and although I may disagree with his conclusions, the debate is valuable. With JRA it was taking a principled stand against a deal that he saw as damaging the community, resiging in protest from Novell (and was/is now being snapped up by Google?).

A project is more likely to succeed if they have an open-minded, forward thinking leader who doesn't shirk the big issues. Of course, picking battles is important - you probably won't hear ESR talking about maintaining biodiversity in freshwater lakes, or RMS warn people about the rapid spread of Lyme Disease any time soon. Still, being able to spot potential external troubles can be just as important as spotting potential internal ones.

Re:benevolent dictators

[linimon]

IMHO the benevolent dictator is not a necessary requirement. The real requirement is that some kind of process (e.g. peer review) can result in a ruling of "no, we aren't going to include that" (for reasons such as architectural integrity, clarity, and/or not violating the "Principle Of Least Astonishment" or POLA as FreeBSD terms it.) I would agree that there does need to be some kind of "the buck stops here" decision-making process; I merely think that it doesn't necessarily have to be one or two people. mcl

One that does not win or Lose ...

[jsnipy]

This is a project that was once was a commerically held game, whose development company went out of business, but the code was still being held by Edios (Pumpkin Studio's pimp in this case). It's a gret RTS, despite its age. I say winner because its good to see this project saved and its code made availble. I also say lose because it problly won't grow anymore than it has. Winner: http://sourceforge.net/projects/warzone2100/

Re:One that does not win or Lose ...

[physicsnick]

Woah. I actually own this game on the original Playstation. I had no idea it had been open sourced.

JMRI!

[Anonymous Coward]

JMRI is a winner.
I use it every day.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[Anonymous Coward]

FM has a few downsides:

- They don't accept OSS packages which only run on non-OSS platforms
- Their interface needs an update... parts are byzantine, other's are way too old.. you can add a "CVSWEB" link, but not anything for SVN or other SCM systems.

That said, I updated a project on FM just yesterday.

Seconded. Numbers != success

[benhocking]

We have an open source project that models brain regions, that is extremely unlikely to ever be widely used by a general audience. However, if it were used by 25% of neuroscientists who run brain simulations, I'm sure we'd consider it successful.

Re:Seconded. Numbers != success

[DaveV1.0]

That is just the thing. A 25% market share of your target audience is good. The thing is most OSS apps don't have even a 10% market share.

Another thing that I see is FLOSS apps that are in perpetual beta, that never make it to 1.0. If something has been around for 3 or 5 years, one would think it would be v1.0. Instead, what we see is v0.93.4223587234856852837501613. At some point, it has to be finished.

Re:Seconded. Numbers != success

[jd]

I agree, though your license may be a little restrictive for some, and I'd put the program very firmly in the category of "not just below the horizon but also below ground". I don't care what Kevin Costner might say on the matter, you've got to let people know you've built it before they will give a damn. Although absolute numbers are inconsequential - and even the relative numbers are really not significant - if it's just right for those who do use it, it is just as important to consider those who WILL need it but who don't yet know the software even exists.

A project is not a success or a failure according to who do NOT use it. That is like arguing that English is a failure because 99.99% of lifeforms in the galaxy do not speak it. Well, why should they? Other than to get a spot on Star Trek, that is. The question is not one of who uses it, but who knows about it. Is the project on Freshmeat? (Answer: No, I looked.) Has it been mentioned on any medical websites? (Answer: Not obviously, though there was a brief mention from Rice University.) The only Wikipedia mention I could find was a single screenshot.

This doesn't make the project bad, but it does mean that it can't possibly reach its potential - in audience, in feedback, in actual day-to-day application, etc. Sure, you posted a link on Slashdot, which is excellent and is bound to get visitors to the site at the very least. However, I doubt rampaging hordes of neurologists visit here, which means although the numbers may be up, they're the wrong numbers. They're not the droids you are looking for.

Re:Seconded. Numbers != success

[MenTaLguY]

Changing the version number to 1.0 won't make it finished, though. We have this conversation in Inkscape every so often, and the consensus has been that it's just more honest this way.

That said, we do have a set of minimum requirements for a 1.0 release, so we're not just putting it off indefinitely.

Re:Seconded. Numbers != success

[Mr Z]

I authored an Intellivision emulator and a development kit for Intellivision. I've got a decent portion of the free Intellivision emulator market, and pretty much all of the dev-kit market. Sure, that's an active audience measured in the dozens, but I'm happy. :-)

--Joe

It's got a funky beat and I can dance to it

[porkrind]

Tony Wasserman says you can put a numeric value on an open source project. As an intellectual, I respect him a great deal, but I'm not so sure that things like the Business Readiness Rating will be that beneficial. It seems highly variable and likely to change over time - to say nothing about how every customer's needs differ greatly.

-John Mark
Hyperic Community Outreach

Loser projects...

[ZwJGR]

Bob'sFreeWidgetZ for Some-System-Nobody-Has-Ever-Heard-Of, version 0.0.1.2.5½ alpha, which hasn't been updated, except for a lengthened Todo list, for over a year, and has one part-time developer, is a perfect example of a 'Loser' OSS Project.
There are plenty of these on Sourceforge.

Cartes du Ceil & Blender = winners, IMO

[nani popoki]

Blender is one I use almost daily. Cartes du Ceil is another. (And yes, I've made a 3D model of a telescope.)

When I Submitted this Story... wah wah

[porkrind]

I noted that not only did the article call out past winners to provide some context, but he also predicted which of the "new breed" of commercial open source would succeed - MuleSource, Alfresco and Hyperic. That was kind of glossed over in the "winning" submission, but it's really the whole point of the article - using past successes in an attempt to pick future winners.

-John Mark
Hyperic Community Outreach

My own

[kevin_conaway]

My own obviously make the "winner" pile. The rest I hear about through word of mouth.

Ending a project is (was) not that easy.

[Stefan Fredriksson]

Ok, I confess. I'm one of the guys thats trashing sf.net.

However, when I realized I would not have time to "finish" my small project (I had a working version up there though) I decided to remove the homepage, *and* the

Now, callar me stupid but I did not manage. I looked over and over for a way to delete *my own* project but didn't manage. I looked a couple of days later and I then send an email to sf.net and explained the situation to them. What did I get in response? Nada, zip.

This was maybe 18 months or so ago and maybe it's better now but my long-ago-abandoned program still sits at sf.net taking up space.

Re:Ending a project is (was) not that easy.

[spectrokid]

That is by design. Open source means you give away your sourcecode, now matter how insignificant. There is always a (very) small chance somebody takes over where you left. So the work you did should not be deleted. It is part of the SF experience...

Re:Ending a project is (was) not that easy.

[DJK]

http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?doci d=14041&group_id=1#project

Winners

[Dynedain]

Aside from the obvious big winners (ie. Firefox/Apache/MySQL/PHP/FreeBSD/Linux) here are some of the lesser-known winners that I like:

Cyberduck - Very clean OSX FTP client
Joomla! - Content Management System
SmoothWall - Router/Firewall Linux distro
VNC - remote desktop
PDFCreator - Great PDF printer for Windows, but really hard to find
VLC - all in one media player for OSX
XMMS - WinAMP-like media player for X11 systems
MythTV - even though it doesn't work for me (yet!)

Some that I think are losers:

Mambo - The project Joomla! forked from when the devs split with the corporation owning the copyright.

OpenDarwin - since Apple seems to be intent on not giving back whatever it doesn't have to.

Blender - just not enough market for another 3D app, which is why the commercial company sold it off to begin with. The nonstandard interface and workflow gets in the way and only enthusiasts really use it (like gimp, but with a much much smaller install base)

Sunbird - the calendar component of Mozilla's offerings... Firefox development has been blasting along, even Thunderbird is doing great, but Sunbird (both the standalone and plugin version) seem to have stagnated... very very unfortunate since the iCal standard is going to explode with the iCal server in OSX Server 10.5 and there are very few Windows clients that utilize it. Mozilla could capture a huge market share here.

PalmOS - once a closed-source winner... soon to be an open-source loser as the Linux-based OS supposedly in development is not adopted. Palm could dominate the market again if they pulled their heads out of their asses (not very likely).

Some of my winners may ultimately be losers. For example, SmoothWall hasn't had a major update in several years, PDFCreator is difficult to find, and would disappear if Adobe included a PDF printer with Acrobat Reader or Microsoft included one in Windows. Likewise, some of my losers could easily become winners if they could pull their acts together.

You can see my bias (as a web developer) but "loser" open source projects seem to just fade away. So I don't think there are many memorable examples as there are of winners. And of course every winner can easily be eclipsed and made a loser if they don't stay on the ball just like closed-source projects.

Re:Winners

[slackmaster2000]

I agree whole-heartedly with PDFCreator. This project has saved me a lot of licensing fees for Adobe Acrobat (for Distiller), and is much more user-friendly than the online converters.

Now if only there was an opensource PDF reader for Windows that was as "easy" as Acrobat Reader, but not as utterly crappy. (I'm half hoping that somebody will pop in here and say, "THERE IS!")

Re:Winners

[Albert Sandberg]

I agree about blender, but what if distros installed it by default as it so often does with the gimp for instance? I think could need a 3d modeler to play around with, and it's not very large when it comes to filesize anyway... dunno what their license agreements say tho.

Re:Winners

[Jorrit]

I think you underestimate the number of people that are using Blender. Recently Blender has been getting a very big increase in popularity (helped partially by the Elephants Dream movie) and Blender is also being used in several professional companies as well. Blender is no longer a small and insignificant project by any means.

Greetings,

Re:Winners

[MadnessASAP]

Blender - just not enough market for another 3D app, which is why the commercial company sold it off to begin with. The nonstandard interface and workflow I personally would have to disagree with you on that the interface once yo get used to it is VERY intuitive and quick to use, granted I am by no means a big time 3D artist but I have taken part in a few small competitions and won them using Blender vs Kids who were using Maya, 3DS Max and Cinema 4D. Also the Blender community is very active and fairly large and the Dev team have been putting many new features into the program that it can now hold its own against the large $500 dollar programs. But that is just my opinion and you are more then entitled to yours.

Re:Winners

[c41rn]

There is a free Acrobat Reader alternative called "Foxit", but alas, it is not open source. I gave it a try a few months ago and it was snappier than Acrobat Reader but it didn't play nice with Firefox. It looks like it's been updated since then, so YMMV.

Re:Winners

[Petrushka]

Also, while Foxit is faster than Acrobat at loading (though only marginally, if you have the Acrobat SpeedLaunch in your Startup folder like you should), it is much, much slower at rendering complex layouts.

By the way, I agree with Dynedain about PDFCreator too, but I'm not sure why s/he thinks it's hard to find -- pdfcreator.sourceforge.net points you to the right place. I'd agree it's difficult for it to get publicity, though, what with all the zillions of adware equivalents out there.

Re:Winners

[Dynedain]

By the way, I agree with Dynedain about PDFCreator too, but I'm not sure why s/he thinks it's hard to find

What I meant is that if you don't explicitly already know about PDFCreator, and know where to find it, it's very difficult to locate. Sometimes when installing I forget what it's called, and sourceforge's search leaves much to be desired. The biggest problem is that people generally don't even know it's possible to install a PDF printer and instead rely on whatever their applications have support for in terms of exporting stand-alone documents. And on our corporate network, the accounting people have 4 different PDF printers installed as part of different accounting packages. Some of which do not even come close to working on XP64bit. If they could all just be redirected to work with one already-installed virtual printer like PDFCreator, I'd be much much happier.

Re:Winners

[sootman]

A couple random notes:
- Cyberduck: I *hate* the idea of paying for an FTP client, but Cyberduck is slow as hell for me and often disconnects. (Anyone else? This happens at work and home, so it's not just my network setup.) Transmit is great and it made me do the unthinkable: pay for an FTP client. Life's too short to babysit file transfers. For Windows, Filezilla is so convoluted it gives me pause, and it's definitely not something I can recommend to anyone but the hardiest of techs. (And since all techs already know about it, I basically never recommend it.)
- Smoothwall: check out IPCop. It was originally a fork of Smoothwall and it's really nice.
- PDFCreator: I used to make PDFs from Windows with a virtual PDF printer in Samba. Not for everyone but it works for me. Moving to OS X has made this a non-issue for me, though.

Re:Winners

[Petrushka]

Sometimes when installing I forget what it's called,

Hm, actually now that you mention it, I realise I've had this problem in the past too. :-) I take your point.

Re:Winners

[Yaztromo]

PalmOS - once a closed-source winner... soon to be an open-source loser as the Linux-based OS supposedly in development is not adopted. Palm could dominate the market again if they pulled their heads out of their asses (not very likely).

I couldn't agree more. This has, unfortunately, bit me right on the ass, in a very topical manner, being the Lead Developer and Project Administrator for the jSyncManager Project, a SourceForge hosted project that provides a 100% pure Java protocol stack, synchronization framework, and full development kit for PalmOS-based devices. The project started in 1997, and at the time Palm even sent me a Palm III to aid in development (and Borland sent me a full suite of Java development tools as well, although as I wasn't developing on Windows I donated it to a good cause). In September 2002, I made the code OSS under the GPL/LGPL, and put it all up on SourceForge.

For a time, we were a big success. As the code ran identically on all platforms, it actually became very popular with German banks and insurance companies. IBM Germany even offered me a pathetic amount of money ($5000 US!) to buy the whole project (I turned them down, but as I was working for IBM at the time we did let it out with a new UI through IBM's alphaWorks as "ManplatoSync for Java"). Many corporations used it for synchronizing and managing their handheld devices, and it even got a write-up in JavaPro, and several other magazines. I even started going on the speaking circuit to talk about the technology behind the jSyncManager (the biggest one being the Wrox Wireless Professional Developers Conference, a series of three conferences which was cancelled after the first due to low pre-registration sales).

The ride was pretty good for a while, but Palm's complete and total lack-lustre record in this decade has caused the project to slide. I did get hired out to consult on integrating it into a medical health record system for hospitals that the Province of British Columbia was developing, but with the death of the PalmOS as a platform, demand for the project stagnated, and I could no longer afford to commit time to it.

So is the jSyncManager a winner, or a loser? At one point, we were in the top 5% of all SourceForge.net projects. We're still ranked rather highly, but in the life of the project on SourceForge we've only had just over 20 000 downloads. Activity is now virtually nil. The project is fortunately quite stable, but as the platform it relied upon is now pretty much a dead duck, and as interest has waned in Java-based projects that aren't web-service related, interest in the project has died as well. I've received perhaps two e-mails in the last 4 months on it.

It also hasn't helped that JSR-080 hasn't made much of a dent, and that it's availability is pretty much limited to Linux only (JSR-080 is the standard for communicating with USB devices in Java). We rely on this API for communicating with the more modern USB-based PalmOS devices, but it's poor availability on Windows and Mac OS X makes the jSyncManager less attractive. And Palm's slowness in introducing decent WiFi into their devices is also a problem (the fastest way to sync a PalmOS device is via WiFi, using HotSync over TCP/IP, which the jSyncManager supports on all Java installations).

The scope of the project always meant that we would probably never reach the Top 10 on SourceForge -- it was a tool that filled a specific niche. Windows users running the Palm Desktop software weren't about to convert en-masse to the Java-based jSyncManager. Users of other platforms, and organizations with mixed platforms loved it as it is easy for them to administer, and it works the same everywhere (including on platforms where they may have no other options). But in the end it's been Palm's poor record of advancing their platform that has done the project in, and now I'm happy to just put it into maintenence mode, and deal with problems if anyone cares to report them.

Yaz.

Re:Winners

[mrbcs]

Saved to the server with a note in a catagorized directory. 104,000 files, 10 years collecting and using about 14 gigs :-)

I have lots of open source and unsupported stuff that I still use.

Re:Winners

[eguanlao]

PDFCreator is not difficult to find: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
VLC is not just for Mac OS X.

Re:Winners

[funfail]

I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Which software is easier to find when you forget the name? I tried the first search phrase that came into my mind:

"open source" pdf printer

and it popped up first in Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22open+source%22+p df+printer

Re:Winners

[TheGreatOrangePeel]

CleanSoftware.org makes finding PDFCreator and many other (very) useful apps very easy to find. Many of you may recall the site was featured on an 'ask slashdot' about 2-3yrs back.

Re:Winners

[Zaphod2016]

I've been using Cyberduck for about a year, and lately it has been giving me all sorts of trouble. It hangs on even the smallest uploads (like a 1kb PHP script). Before the last upgrade it worked like a charm. Go figure.

phpBookExchange

[Anonymous Coward]

Currently used by over 600 students at plnubooks.com to directly exchange their used textbooks and save a few bucks in the process.

http://bookexchange.sourceforget.net/

It's my favorite because I wrote it :)

It's not about winning or losing

[El_Muerte_TDS]

OpenSource will always win on some level. Projects can be assiminated into another projects, it's possible to combine the efforts of multiple similar projects into the "stronger" project. The strong project way have won a battle, but all project won in the end.
The only party that might lose is the end-user, but then again, they would lose much less if they backed a closed source project, because in that case they wouldn't have any possibility to continue the project.

Quick tip...

[jimhill]

If a guy is worried about his project being perceived as a "looser", it's a loser.

Re:Quick tip...

[Plaid Phantom]

I personally wouldn't mind being known as "that guy who can open the pickle jar."

Not that I *can* open the pickle jar, I'm just sayin'.

Re:Quick tip...

[fishermonger]

Ooch! Uncalled for
Why is this modded 4 insighful?

Every one of them is a winner

[sstamps]

If someone gets something out of any project, be it useful function, useful knowledge, or even simple amusement, then it is a winner. The article is attempting to discern POPULARITY of projects as the criteria of each being a winner/loser. Personally, I don't give a damn about how popular something is. If it is the right tool for the job, and works, it's golden to me.

Even open-source BrainFuck programs are winners as far as I am concerned, because they amuse me. :)

My main set of winners is....

[CodeShark]

...any of the major projects on the list at opensourcecms.com for a simple reason: I can look at virtually every major open-source based CMS project out there, see installs, get user community feedback on each of them, and look for more effective implementations all in one place.

I think I have come up with more innovations that I can adapt for use in my company that are based on stuff in these CMS packages than any other single web location I can think of.

Re:My main set of winners is....

[the_womble]

Provided you want only PHP + MySQL based CMSs.

phpScheduleIt

[Shuntros]

This rocks; http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpscheduleit I use it at our University helpdesk for loaning out cameras, external HDD's etc, and I also use it as a booking system for a small aircraft owned by our 6-man group. A great example of someone spending hundreds of hours of their own time writing software with huge real-world value, and for absolutely no reward.

Open Source Development HOW-TO

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Introduction

   As everyone knows, Open Source software is the wave of the future. With the market share of GNU/Linux and *BSD increasing every day, interest in Open Source Software is at an all time high.

   Developing software within the Open Source model benefits everyone. People can take your code, improve it and then release it back to the community. This cycle continues and leads to the creation of far more stable software than the 'Closed Source' shops can ever hope to create.

   So you're itching to create that Doom 3 killer but don't know where to start? Read on!

2. First Steps

   The most important thing that any Open Source project needs is a Sourceforge page. There are tens of thousands of successful Open Source projects on Sourceforge.Net; the support you receive here will be invaluable.

   OK, so you've registered your Sourceforge.Net project and set the status to '0: Pre-Thinking About It', what's next?

3. Don't Waste Time!

   Now you need to set up your SourceForge.net homepage. Keep it plain and simple - don't use too many HTML tags, just knock something up in VI. Website editors like FrontPage and DreamWeaver just create bloated eye-candy - you need to get your message to the masses!

4. Ask For Help

   Since you probably can't program at all you'll need to try and find some people who think they can. If your project is a game you'll probably need an artist too. Ask for help on your new Sourceforge pages. Here is an example to get you started:

   "Hi there! Welcom to my SorceForge page! I am planing to create a Fisrt Person Shooter game for Linux that is going to kick Doom 3's ass! I have loads of awesome ideas, like giant robotic spiders! I need some help thouh as I cant program or draw. If you can program or draw the tekstures please get in touch! K thx bye!"

   Thousands of talented programmers and artists hang out at Sourceforge.net ready to devote their time to projects so you should get a team together in no time!
5. The A-Team

   So now you have your team together you are ready to change your projects status to '1: Pre-Bickering'. You will need to discuss your ideas with your team mates and see what value they can add to the project. You could use an Instant Messaging program like MSN for this, but since you run Linux you'll have to stick to e-mail.

   Don't forget that YOU are in charge! If your team doesn't like the idea of giant robotic spiders just delete them from the project and move on. Someone else can fill their place and this is the beauty of Open Source development. The code might end up a bit messy and the graphics inconsistant - but it's still 'Free as in Speech'!

6. Getting Down To It

   Now that you've found a team of right thinking people you're ready to start development. Be prepared for some delays though. Programming is a craft and can take years to learn. Your programmer may be a bit rusty but will probably be writing "hello world" programs after school in no time.

   Closed Source games like Doom 3 use the graphics card to do all the hard stuff anyhow, so your programmer will just have to get the NVidia 'API' and it will be plain sailing! Giant robot spiders, here we come!

7. The Outcome

   So it's been a few years, you still have no files released or in CVS. Your programmer can't get enough time on the PC because his mother won't let him use it after 8pm. Your artist has run off with a Thai She-Male. Your project is still at '1: Pre-Bickering'...

   Congratulations! You now have a successful Open Source project on Sourceforge.net! Pat yourself on the back, think up another idea and do it all again! See how simple it is?

Define "Winner"

[Hymer]

...in our reality we can't measure success in kG of gold left by users... installed base may be a way of measuring but how do you get that info (and no, that is not the same as "how many downloads") ?
A winner is simply a project with a satisfied userbase of significant size.
...and no, that doesn't make Windows a success... just ask any Windows user if they would accept a car, TV set or washing machine wich behaved like their Windows and you'll get the answer "You are not serious, are you ?".
--
I left Windows 3 years ago with the intention of returning after one year...

MAME

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the biggest problems with most open source projects on Sourceforge is the lack of decisive leadership. Simply starting a project does not guarantee success, you need to have a vision and see it through, sticking with it for years to come. This of course also requires that the leader has coding skills, so that he or she can make responsible decisions about the direction towards which the code base is taken.

A fine example is MAME, although it's not on Sourceforge (and we can debate until the end of the world whether it fulfills the definition of "Open Source"). It in fact today reached its 10th anniversary counting from the first release. Only with persistent leadership (though the project coordinator has changed a couple of times along the years) and a vision to preserve all storage media -based arcade games in a single program has it been able to survive this long, far longer than any other arcade game emulator. This pretty much proves that the policies undertaken by the MAME team were the right thing to do, even if they were sometimes unpopular amongst the users.

It all depends on the goal.

[leuk_he]

If the goal of all those 140,417 (yup, the article si a few hunderd projects behind ;) ) is to make an everlasting impression and change the look of the world, there would be a lot of dissatified developers. However most of those project are just a idea, and other projects that are maintained have different goals. Maybe just for fun or to develop knowledge. Not everyone is interesting in taking over the world.

Slashdot style modding

[parvenu74]

Why not establish a slashdot-style moderation system, requiring the mods to be backed by rational explanation and not just "I like language X therefore this is cool."

Re:Slashdot style modding

[semiotec]

great! and then we can moderate the moderators for their rationale, but then who's going to moderate the moderators who moderate the moderators?

I think there was a point in there somewhere.

Winners vs. Losers? ... its not a game

[CountJoe]

I don't appreciate the idea of Winners vs. Losers in the open source world. It's not a game. There are a lot of open source projects that never get released or never get a following, but that doesn't make them Losers. Sometimes you start a project and find out that someone else has already done, or is doing, something better. Sometimes you just lose interest. Things happen. At least some people are trying. And they're not losers.

I say this because I have started/joined several now-dead projects.

Re:Winners vs. Losers? ... its not a game

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't appreciate the idea of Winners vs. Losers in the open source world ... I say this because I have started/joined several now-dead projects.

Paraphrased: I say this because I don't want to be labeled a loser. ... j/k ;)

A few winners (imho)...

[ScislaC]

Inkscape FileZilla 7-Zip Notepad++

"Under way" ?!?!?

[Craigster]

No, there aren't "139,834 open-source projects under way" at SourceForge. Most are placeholders for ideas or to somehow reserve a name for a project someone would like to do someday. Of the projects that actually do exist, most are in 0.01a release, old, abandoned, and hardly in any kind of active development phase.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[zeenixus]

now, if only there were hundreds, nay thousands of hosting providers out there that offered F/OSS blogs and such ...

F/OSS CRM? you must be joking, or severely google challenged. sugar, vtiger and others I'm sure. you can even SHOP TEH INTARWEBZ for those that offer hosting and support for them.

Barely anyone is a loser

[rg3]

I have developped several open source programs. Most of them very small tools, none of them over 3000 lines as much. From those, only one has a number of users in the thousands and can be considered a "winner". However, I use two more of them _daily_. One of those two doesn't even have 50 users if any. There's another one which I don't know how many people use but probably almost none, but I did it for my father, and he uses it from time to time with great results. And, finally, I did another one for an online friend that, as far as I know, has used it successfully many many times.

So, are they losers really? If I use them, I don't care how many more people use them. They fill my needs. If I create a program for another person or group of people and they use it frequently because it fullfills their needs, how can it be a loser?

The only losers are the programs that aren't used by anyone, the people that asked for it or their creators. And how much of those are there? I don't think many.

Those that provide an alternative to closed source

[cjmt]

The big winners (to me) are those projects who provide a viable or better alternative to available closed source software and those that you'd put into a business and trust to "just work". To find them you need to test, test and test some more. My winners, those that spring to mind immediately as being trusted not to embarrass me, are

• mOnOwall - firewalling
• IPCop - firewalling
• Metadot - CMS
• Apache - web server
• Bind - Name Server
• asterisk - telephony/voip
• Sendmail - cussed but stable MTA
• SpamAssassin - spam filtering
• MIME-Defang - email content filtering/manipulation
• ClamAV - Virus filtering
• Freebsd - the best OS since sliced bread (IMHO)
• Centos - Not to shabby an OS either
• ...

The other winners are those that are used everyday as part of the tools to do the job and never really thought about. Nmap, vim, perl, portupgrade, cvsup and many more.

OpenVista.

[jez9999]

Ouch, that's an unfortunate name. It's got to be up there with the great oxymorons of our time like Microsoft Works, and Trusted Computing.

Re:Those that provide an alternative to closed sou

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the best open source shopping cart?

all

[treak007]

Even if only one person downloads the software and finds it useful, then the software is still a success. Perhaps not a success from a business model sense, but a success in an open source sense.

Lose the cutesy-pie names

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe such mysterious names like "Cyberduck" are part of the problem. Windows and OSX are not much more descriptive but I'm familiar with them. I've never heard of Cyberduck, I'd have no clue from the name what it might be for, and probably wouldn't be motivated to investigate it out of all of the clutter. My best guess would be that it is either a carnival game or a hunting simulator. I suspect a CIO would be reluctant to recommend a product with that name.

I don't even know what to say about "Joomla!" except lose the cutesy-pie names.

Re:Lose the cutesy-pie names

[Dynedain]

That's a very good point and spot-on. A classic example is "gimp"... how seriously are companies going to take a product that shares its name with the very politically incorrect slang word for a cripple?

Although it holds true for closed-source projects as well... Shake and Combustion (owned by Apple and Autodesk respectively) are names you wouldn't associate with compositing package unless you already know about them. Basic names such as "AntiVirus" usually only work as branded with their corporate entity and then only for well-known types of tools (office products, utilities, email clients, etc.)

That and open source projects usually don't have the budget, time, or knowledge to research branding and identity.

Re:Lose the cutesy-pie names

[Anonymous Coward]

A classic example is "gimp"...

Indeed, you can't expect people to understand what the GNU Image Manipulation Program is used for, how about giving it a desciptive name!

Re:Lose the cutesy-pie names

[westlake]

Indeed, you can't expect people to understand what the GNU Image Manipulation Program is used for, how about giving it a desciptive name!

The problem is, what the eye sees is the English word gimp, meaning crippled. It shapes the user's first impressions.

Expect the same response when you KDE app is KRAP.

Re:Lose the cutesy-pie names

[Anonymous Coward]

A classic example is "gimp"... how seriously are companies going to take a product that shares its name with the very politically incorrect slang word for a cripple?

  Gimp means something beautiful or well-formed. (Also a tool of dress-makers) It's slang usage for the crippled is supposed to be sarcastic.

Re:Lose the cutesy-pie names

[Anonymous Coward]

how about giving it a desciptive name

Like Photoshop?

Still fairly new

[benhocking]

Most of the current work has been direct one-on-one with others who do brain modeling. Hence the Rice mention. It's a fairly small group, so it's not too hard to just talk to everyone who might be interested in using it. :) Also, it's still a fairly new project, and none of us are OSS afficiondos.

Re:Still fairly new

[jd]

Heh! I'm less an OSS afficado (although that label still definitely applies to me) as I am an information afficadio. In the end, OSS is merely one more model of information dispersal, no matter what any person's opinion on OSS happens to be. The key is that it's all about information. Without that, OSS has no inherent value. It's just a bunch of magnetic states on some iron oxide.

Would you have any objection to me adding some references to your project on a few OSS project sites?

Re:The Losers:

[PHPfanboy]

It makes you worse. I'm surprised you didn't get mod points for your Yoda-speak though.

Size of user base means little

[ChrisA90278]

Many of those 100,000+ projects were never ment to be "big" for example I have one project there. It is a Linux kernel drivel and some user land stuff that goes with it. The driver controls an astronomical camera of which less than one dozen wer made. Onless you run a TASS Mk III camera you don't need this.

Much of this stuff is intended for a very small user group, so if only 50 people use it, it is not a failure. One example is software to help with EME radio (EME is "Earth, Moon, Earth" where you bounce radio signals off the moon.) this is very popular but only within a small community. Actually MOST software is like this. Here at work I'm working on software to process telemetry data from space lift boosters. Not many people need this. I'd guess n the closed source worlld 99% of everything is written for just a few users and therefor never published.

Don't count quality or usefullness by the number o users

Re:Size of user base means little

[Anonymous Coward]

I have one project there. It is a Linux kernel drivel

Don't be so hard on yourself. It's not that awful..

Nice list. With one bummer.

[Qbertino]

Blender - just not enough market for another 3D app, which is why the commercial company sold it off to begin with. The nonstandard interface and workflow gets in the way and only enthusiasts really use it (like gimp, but with a much much smaller install base)

My gosh. Your list is more or less compliant to mine, but this is a complete bummer. Blender is one of the gallionfigures of the OSS movement and it's installed base is easyly 10 to 100 times larger that that of Gimp. If only Gimp were as easy to install as Blender. It competes with packages that are 50 times larges and cost upwards of 2000$. It's got a fully OpenGL accelerated GUI - which afaik no other programm has had that long - and has gotten recent feature additions that put it way ahead of competition in a lot of fields. Blender is the OSS application that is currently scaring the living piss out of the entire 3D industry and for good reasons too. You're entirely wrong on this one.

Re:Nice list. With one bummer.

[renoX]

>It's got a fully OpenGL accelerated GUI

I cannot believe I'm reading this..
What matters for a GUI is the *ease of use* period, it could be implemented in OpenGL or in Tcl/Tk, who cares?

What the GP said is that the GUI is non-standard so it's more difficult to use, you may disagree with this point but answering that Blender is good because the GUI is written in OpenGL, sigh..

Re:Nice list. With one bummer.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just it: The Blender GUI IS easy to use. It's just not so easy to learn for the first time. I've never encountered another interface in my 25+ years of computer use that was more focused than Blender's interface on both getting out of your way, and exposing as much functionality as possible to within easy reach. The interface was designed from the ground-up for speed of execution, (and customization for a given task, which is where the OpenGL stuff comes in) making it the most efficient modeling interface of any 3D app out there -- which is what another poster in this thread was talking about when he said he'd won a number of modeling contests thanks to Blender. Learning its interface is a one-time investment with a big payoff in speed.

  3D modeling is vastly more difficult to learn for the first time than the Blender interface, so I don't see why people will gladly invest effort in the one but complain about the other. It took me about an hour and a half to get basic familiarity with Blender's interface, and a few days to get comfortable with it.. OTOH, months later I'm still a beginner at 3D modeling. (Maybe 3d software should have a "be a great artist" button, eh? Heh!)

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[itwerx]

SQL-ledger is a good bookkeeping package (and a whole lot more) and SugarCRM can handle the CRM side of things. There's even some glue scripts out there to keep the client info sync'd between them.

I'd also add Zimbra to the list of very good non-SourceForge projects. However, to be fair, the original poster was referring mostly to word of mouth being the primary source of info, nothing in the post said, "anything not on SourceForge is te suxors!"

lingering without improving

[bcrowell]

There is a tendency for a lot of OSS projects to linger on without ever improving. They're sort of like the neurotic family dog that is reasonably well behaved in some ways, but never quite got to be 100% reliable about not pooping on the carpet.

In hopes of alienating as many people as possible, I'll list a bunch of projects that I see as being in this category:

• OOo. Still lacks a lot of functionality that people are used to having in Office, which makes it hard to build enthusiasm for switching from Office to OOo. I noticed that TFA counts it as one of the losers, and I have to agree. The big problem here, AFAICT, is a huge codebase of fairly poor quality code, which doesn't make anybody want to work on it.
• xpdf. On the one hand, I use it every day of my life, and I love how it starts up so fast. On the other hand, it has obvious rendering bugs that have existed for a very long time, and are apparently never going to get fixed. (The UI is also very 1982.)
• Perl 6. I was really enthusiastic about this in 2000. Now there's pugs, but I don't see any sign that the project will ever progress to a real-world implementation.
• Perl/Tk. There's just scads of software out there that uses Perl/Tk, including some that I wrote. OK, I'm grateful to Nick Ing-Simmons for writing it, but he's no longer maintaining it actively, and nobody else has stepped up to the plate to take over maintenance. There are starting to be some really serious problems with Perl/Tk on recent Linux distros, and patches for them are not getting applied. I believe Perl/Tk is heavily used in the financial industry by stock traders; I wonder how many of those firms are regretting tying themselves to it.

Re:lingering without improving

[jjn1056]

As a Perl programmer I can also say I've had my ups and downs with Perl6 development. Certainly this has not followed the standard trajectory for language development in a lot of ways. I think a big part of this was the fact that shortly into the process Larry Wall became gravely ill and for a while the project floundered. In the end I really think this was a good thing, not Mr Wall becoming ill of course, but it answered the question about what will happen to Perl when Larry decides to retire. What has happened is that over time a new group of very talented developers moved into leadership positions and began to substantially drive the project. So actually the Perl6 idea really spawned a dramatic change in the Perl community. This was exactly the kind of change that I believe Larry wanted to see. I believe that change was for the best, although it has been painful and has slowed some goals down. However I don't think it's correct to say that Perl6 is lingering without improving.

One thing that's been very important is how the ideas of Perl6 are influencing Perl5 development. Certainly a lot of the things that got people excited about Perl6 have been experimented with in Perl5. For example, there is the Moose Project (http://search.cpan.org/~stevan/Moose-0.17/lib/Moo se.pm) which is a Perl6 inspired Object Oriented framework for Perl5 that is really fantastic and has given Perl5 developers some great tools and techniques. In fact there is a whole perl6 section on CPAN, which is dedicated to playing with Perl6 concepts in Perl5.

I wouldn't give up hope on this project. Remember how the Mozilla project seemed to stall, right after they decided to dump the Netscape legacy code base and write an new browser from scratch? A lot of people felt that was a bad idea. It seemed like we were waiting forever for that magic version 1. However as we can see in the long term it was a good strategy and now Firefox is the premier Open Source web browser and a great success story. I believe in something similar for the Perl6 project.

Additionally the community has changed a lot on the past few years, and this change has affected what we want from Perl6. Perl developers are a different breed from the early 90s, there are a lot of us that want to use Perl for true enterprise application development, not justs system administration scripts, cron jobs and quick and dirty CGI applications. This is why there is so much interested in projects like Catalyst (http://search.cpan.org/~mramberg/Catalyst-Runtime -5.7006/lib/Catalyst.pm) in the Perl community. So this change has come with some growing pains. Perl6 has reflected those growing pains in a lot of ways.

So yes, Perl6 isn't completed, but I think the purpose of the Perl6 project, which was to reinvigorate the community and to act as a incubator for ideas, has been very successful.

Re:lingering without improving

[schweini]

Just wanted to point out that Nick Ing-Simmons died a while ago, which might be a cause of Perl/Tk's slow progress.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[Vengeance_au]

In regards to CRM - I've been using sugarCRM for about 6 months and its been rock solid, with pretty much everything I need to run a quickly growing business. Nice and robust, good forums of users willing to help, and a number of hosters offer it as a one-click include. I found it via the magic google query of ["open source" crm] - just like I found the reporting tool (jasperReports) via ["open source" reporting].

I only ever search through sourceforge, freshmeat etc when I have a name of software that I am specifically searching for - otherwise I find you end up wading through 100's of apps that are abandoned, alpha, etc. I do believe those sites serve a useful purpose, just not as the first point to search.

Recipe for project success

[Dracos]

Having recently become involved again with a floundering project that I helped start (with the intention of saving it from itself), I read this article not only as a "magic 8 ball user manual" for businesses looking for open source solutions, but also as a recipe for success that projects with any aspirations beyond serving their developers' immediate needs should pay attention to.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[coyotecult]

I like Open Source Mac for open source software that runs on Macs. It's easy to hand out to friends who have Macs.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[Anonymous Coward]

So write it yourself!

Jeez, what do people not get about this "scratching an itch" thing.

And if you answer "well I couldn't be bothered", then stop complaining that others with less interest also couldn't be bothered.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[kestasjk]

Agreed, at one point my online strategy game was in the top 200 most active on sourceforge.net, well above many of the others listed in this thread. Activity ratings are the default way that searches are ordered, and they vary so much it's difficult to tell the truly active, popular projects from the others.

No objection

[benhocking]

I definitely have no objection. On one hand, I doubt many in our target audience will find it there. On the other hand, it only takes one to make it worthwhile. Furthermore, I suppose many of our target audience's minions might find it there. ;)

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[anomalous cohort]

I'm a big fan of http://plone.org/ which is a CMS that sits on top of the http://www.zope.org/ application server. All of which is OSS. I can't speak to OSS CRM but others here have. There are plenty of fantastic server side developer productivity boosting OSS software out there.

• Try http://jakarta.apache.org/ for lots of Java libraries.
• I find http://www.springframework.org/ is a great framework extension for Java.
• I like spring better, but http://www.hibernate.org/ provides an ORM for both Java and .NET developers.
• If you are working in Perl, then http://www.cpan.org/ is the place for you.

When it comes to client side software there is a huge amount of great OSS apps.

• I believe that http://sourceforge.net/projects/ganttproject/ is great for project management.
• I have used http://sourceforge.net/projects/freemind/ for years and know it to be a great mind mapping tool.
• I believe that http://live.gnome.org/Dia/ is a great diagramming tool.
• I'm a big fan of http://www.umlet.com/ and find it to be very useful for creating UML diagrams.
• I switched from sodipodi to http://www.inkscape.org/ which is fantastic for drawing vector images.
• I am also a big fan of http://www.gimp.org/ which is used to draw raster images.

I have used all of these projects for years and would most definitely label them as quality, winner OSS.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[anomalous cohort]

How could I forget to mention http://www.openoffice.org/ which is a great office productivity suite and http://www.eclipse.org/ which is great developer IDE suite? All OSS, of course.

Here's how you can tell the winners

[VGfort]

1) need active developer(s) that are working on it constantly
2) good and active forums for feedback, requests, bug reports
3) releases that aren't too far apart
4) some promotion on slashdot/digg or the web, something that gets people interested in it

Blender interface

[dbIII]

It's not easy to have an interface to all the features in a 3D drawing or modelling environment - in AutoCAD I find I use the command line a lot to get to all the options quickly.

I'm still waiting for a competitor...

[patio11]

Three times my little slice of commercial software development has made it onto Slashdot. (http://www.bingocardcreator.com -- It makes bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers.)
Three times folks have said its trivial (true as it goes -- it took me a man-week to write.)
Three times folks have said its disgusting to charge $24.95 for it (good thing I don't sell to Slashdot readers.)
Three times folks have said OSS is going to put me out of business.
Three times folks have actually offered to donate labor to put me out of business. ...

Three years my OSS competitor has gone without a patch. (http://sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards) It lacks a few key features, like actually printing the cards it makes. This makes it more active than 80% of the projects on Sourceforge.

Is bingo-cards a success? Well, it probably accomplished what the author wanted it to, and good for him. Is it going to put me out of business? No. Is OSS ever going to supplant commercial software in bingo card creation or a whole lot of other human endeavors? No.

Re:I'm still waiting for a competitor...

[Slashcrap]

Three times my little slice of commercial software development has made it onto Slashdot. (http://www.bingocardcreator.com -- It makes bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers.)
Three times folks have said its trivial (true as it goes -- it took me a man-week to write.)
Three times folks have said its disgusting to charge $24.95 for it (good thing I don't sell to Slashdot readers.)
Three times folks have said OSS is going to put me out of business.
Three times folks have actually offered to donate labor to put me out of business. ...

Are you sure they weren't just taking the piss?

I can't really imagine anyone donating their time to cater for whatever percentage of elementary school teachers would pay $25 to print bingo cards. Maybe if you branched out into printing bingo cards for people that aren't elementary school teachers? I don't know, it just sounds like a larger potential market. And is bingo really a major subject in US schools? Did it replace evolution on the curriculum or something?

On the other hand I can easily imagine someone wanting to wind you up.

Re:I'm still waiting for a competitor...

[Anonymous Coward]

This would suggest that creating Bingo cards is not an interesting challenge. It is interesting to you, because you make some money from it, but that motivation doesn't exist for an OSS developer, so what's left? If you were selling something interesting you might find more competitors, both OSS & commercial.

Re:I'm still waiting for a competitor...

[Anonymous Coward]

You pinpoint an interesting property of OSS, though: it tends to produce software based on what problems are interesting to solve, rather than based on what sort of software users feel they need. Very often, these two coincide, but occasionally they do not(trivial niche software such as the grandparent is a case in point).

Obviously, creating software that the author feels he or she needs becomes an interesting challenge simply because it promises a reward if they can solve it.

(This is a comment on "minor" open source projects which isn't really meant to apply to the projects that realistically aim to compete with major commercial packages, or even are already significant or dominant players in some aspect of the industry - i.e. Apache, Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice, and so on. These projects probably attract programmers to solve even their "noninteresting" problems by sheer popularity(quite a few also have paid contributors).)

Gaim

[sixthousand]

I'm a bit surprised there hasn't been any mention of Gaim. For me, not only is it probably the open source application I use most frequently, but also the one of the few I use consistently on both win and linux platforms.

filters

[zogger]

SF has good filters, you can narrow down thousands (whatever, big number) of hits to just a few with a few clicks, following a host of parameters, including development stage. Same with google on general searches if you get good with the -minus excludes.

does programing langauge matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

i'll admit it, i never made anything in c/c++/java, But i'm curious does the success count on what language is used? I use php, freebasic, and python, Does that make a my programs less succesful? if i did go with the languages like c/c++/asm/java would more devs. be insterested, thus more success ???

-spasm

Future solution

[DrYak]

XPDF - The De-facto best PDF viewing engine on Linux has recently been forked into the poppler projet : a project to separate core function into a library to make easier to create software using the XPDF engine, like KPDF (Nice poppler rendering engine, but unlike the original XPDF has a non ugly interface too).

Because of its portable and easily integrable characteristics, poppler will probably be at the origins of the first viable alternative to Acrobat Reder (slow) and GhostView for Windows (Ugly).
So controlling the "Programs using Poppler" section in the Poppler Wiki and looking for promising Windows application is a good starting point.
There's a poppler based win32 program called Sumatra PDF viewer. For now it's a very early unstable version (0.3), but one day, it may become the perfect alternative.

Re:Future solution

[Laur]

I'm hoping that KPDf (along with a lot of other great KDE software) will come to Windows with KDE 4.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[ralphdaugherty]

Most of the projects were in the Alpha stages, if that, and many were just starting up... I just committed heresy here on Slashdot and I'm waiting for the wips and chains.

      You already found the wips.

  rd

Hmmmm

[WindBourne]

SCO has unfairly (and I hope illegally) accused IBM of theft. IBM has had to spend 10's of millions defending this slander. OTH, all of the top ppl of SCO have received millions from MS and Sun. In addition, they have played the market and kept it artificially inflated until MS and Sun were ready. What will happen to SCO? It will dissolved. What will happen to the top ppl from SCO? They are lot richer than you or I, probably richer than the lawyers at IBM, and will go on to pull another scan elsewhere.

I do have to wonder, who is the real winner here? Offhand, I would say all of the ppl in SCO, as well as MS and Sun. I am not so certain that IBM has won. I only hope that the OSS world wins, but it takes this case going all the way.

Re:Hmmmm

[htd2]

Your posting implies that Sun is somehow anti OpenSource. The reality as the EU has just revealed is that Sun's support for OpenSource in terms of material donations dwarfs all the other commercial and non-commercial contributors. Sun has apparently donated 3x more code than any other entity. A very odd strategy for a company that is also allegedly trying to destroy FOSS.

Re:Hmmmm

[WindBourne]

I don't imply anything. I state that Sun was part of the conspiracy to push (or at least help) SCO into this lawsuit with IBM. They funded SCO to the tune of 20 million dollars for rights that they already owned. I believe that it was McNealy that did this in Sun's name. Further, I suspect that it was that action that got him outed from Sun (combined with the slowing of sales, the gradual down turning of Sun's name, etc). But I suspect that the board was aware of how much damage McNealy has done to Sun over the last 5 years.

Now, Sun "appears" to be pushing OSS (GPLing Java and possibly Solaris). Howpefully, this will work for them.

Re:Hmmmm

[htd2]

The SCO transaction was highly unlikely to have figured at all on McNealy's departure from Sun. Why would it, conspiracy theorists will no doubt believe that Sun handed 20 million to SCO to fund their case with IBM however the reality is that Sun wanted x86 device driver code for Solaris x86 which was never part of their original license with AT&T.

SCO had the code, Sun bought it.

Now SCO may well have used the Sun money to fund their case but trying to pin the blame for that on Sun is rather like accusing every one who has in the past paid for a UNIXware license of funding SCO's assault on Linux.

Sadly your points serve to illuminate a common but always wrong view of Sun in the OSS community. Sun has always pushed OSS, they have always been the largest commercial donor to the OSS community even when IBM appeared to be making all the running. In fact many people think that OSS is the success it is largely because of Sun. Their insistence in using public standards, published interfaces and their willingness to provide easy access to source code pre-dates OSS and it has been argued provided the necessary foundations for Linux, etc to flourish. Remember Sun was doing this when IBM was pushing SNA and VM and HP was pushing MPE.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Here is a partial list of successful free software projects not on Sourceforge: No, that's basically it. When it comes to server software, interpreted languages, a couple of RDMSs, browsers, and toolkits, Sourceforge is GREAT!

Huh? Read my post again (emphasis added):

Here is a partial list of successful free software projects not on Sourceforge:

My point is that if you only look at Sourceforge, you'll miss a lot of good stuff. Sourceforge tends to attract projects that are too small to host their own files.

In Open Source...

[Anonymous Coward]

...there are no losers. Kinda like the special olympics.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[juhaz]

Python actually is partially on sourceforge, though they've been moving away for quite a while, but tracker is pretty much the only thing left and even that is being moved at the moment.

He's right though, in a roundabout way sourceforge is great for identifying mature projects - you don't find them there.

windowsWinners =

[cyclomedia]

Start->Programs->MS Visual Studio (or DevCpp, or Visual-MinGW, but preferably all three)
File->Load Project/Workspace->[project file]
Build
double click resulting exe

for an example of how NOT to achieve this see FireFox

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[Per Abrahamsen]

>> Here is a partial list of successful free software projects not on Sourceforge:

> No, that's basically it.

Uh, no, we could easily continue: FireFox, OpenOffice.org, KDE, R, and Perl are also successful software project not on SourceForge.

I suspect you managed to totally miss the point of the message you responded to.

small problem with PDFCreator's installer

[gr8dude]

They've switched to MSI installers; I installed 0.9.0 at some point in the past and deleted the installer. Now I want to update to the latest 0.9.3 and it won't install unless I point it to the old installer.

I know I can deal with this by downloading the old one, but this is counter intuitive and it doesn't make sense.

Does anybody know how this can be handled?

make install without beeing root is possible

[krischik]

I almost never run make install as root. to be precise I run:

make DESTDIR=/var/tmp/whatever install

as a normal user. And indeed that is the prefered way to create an RPM package.

Martin

Check the apt-get and pkg-get sits

[davecb]

As I use both Linux and Solaris, I often go to Blastwave and Steve Christensen's Sun Freeware site.

If the type of program I'm looking for is there, it's popular enough for people to have asked for it to be prepackaged for them.

Consider it "voting with their feet" (;-))

--dave

Misread the title

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought the title said How To Tell Open-Source Whiners They're Losers

I've had to do that a few times in my time. They take it really badly.

Imagine if private companies

[Gauchito]

Had a public list of all the projects they had started that fizzled/died/been abandoned. How long would that list be?

Mailing List Application

[head_dunce]

For years I've been searching for an open source application that would manage large mailing lists and have the marketing know-how of the Lsoft Listserv/Maestro bundle. I finally found it a couple months ago -- http://www.openemm.com/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/openemm The application is a single server spin off of the paid version by Agnitas in Germany. Once I installed it, I was so impressed with what this application does that I'm actually getting involved in the open source project. I'm assuming that's just going to be the trend: find the application you want in the open source world and since someone else has already invested a lot of time into the code, you feel almost obligated to help out.

Mumble and Murmur

[Unnamed Chickenheart]

http://mumble.sourceforge.net/

Open alternative to TeamSpeak / Ventrilo.

        * Very low latency.
        * Denoising of audio.
        * Echo cancellation to enable playing on surround speakers.
        * Automatic volume control so all players are equally loud.
        * Positional audio with supported games (the voice of players comes from their direction ingame).
        * Unlimited number of channels with as deep a nesting as desired.
        * Per-channel groups and access control lists.

Prevalence of installs out there...

[Panaqqa]

Quite often, if I'm not certain about an OSS package, I'll just do a quick check for existing installs of the software on the web in general. Usually it will only take 2 or 3 good solid implementations by organizations of more than minimal size to convince me. When it comes to stuff that is potentially mission critical, I'm not about to pick on the bleeding edge - or take pity on orphans.

Multitail!

[anonieuweling]

Multitail!
MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). It can also monitor wildcards: if another file matching the wildcard has a more recent modification date, it will automatically switch to that file. That way you can, for example, monitor a complete directory of files. Merging of 2 or even more logfiles is possible. It can also use colors while displaying the logfiles (through regular expressions), for faster recognition of what is important and what not. Multitail can also filter lines (again with regular expressions) and has interactive menus for editing given regular expressions and deleting and adding windows. One can also have windows with the output of shell scripts and other software. When viewing the output of external software, MultiTail can mimic the functionality of tools like 'watch' and such. http://vanheusden.com/multitail/

Mod parent up!

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Quite correct. What picks winners from losers in general? Often it is more about timing and other issues than anything else. Quite often aspects of a "loser" project are the seeds of a "winner" project.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[Tanuki64]

Why do you think these are successful free software projects? Many users? This is wrong thinking. For example, in your list is Linux and BSD. Both might have millions of users. But both are operating systems so they are (within limits, no fight here) interchangeable. Therefore each Linux user is a loss for BSD and vice versa. You could say, that if one of them really were successful, the other would not exist anymore. In relation to that, isn't a program with a small user base, let's say 50 users, much more successful, when it can claim 100% of its possible user base?

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[namekuseijin]

"A RELEASED VERSION of software and someone who will fix his problems..." ...*for free*, you forgot to mention. If someone would solve all my problems for free, i'd be the luckiest guy in the whole world. :)

nah! doesn't work like that in free software: it's not one guy with the obligation to build houses for free for other people to live; it's more like everyone building a huge patchy house for everyone to live in.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

Why do you think these are successful free software projects? Many users?

No, I define it as "not complete garbage, and has a big enough user base that I won't be completely on my own if I use it."

For example, in your list is Linux and BSD. Both might have millions of users. But both are operating systems so they are (within limits, no fight here) interchangeable. Therefore each Linux user is a loss for BSD and vice versa. You could say, that if one of them really were successful, the other would not exist anymore. In relation to that, isn't a program with a small user base, let's say 50 users, much more successful, when it can claim 100% of its possible user base?

How is it useful to define success in that way? The grandparent was talking about looking at Sourceforge to avoid sifting through a bunch of hobby projects that aren't going anywhere.

You might as well have said this:

For example, in your list is Coke and Pepsi. Both might have millions of users. But both are soft drinks so they are (within limits, no fight here) interchangeable. Therefore each Coke user is a loss for Pepsi and vice versa. You could say, that if one of them really were successful, the other would not exist anymore.

You sound like someone who could benefit from this article.

Re:I go to Sourceforge after I learn about a progr

[Tanuki64]

Why do you think these are successful free software projects? Many users?

No, I define it as "not complete garbage, and has a big enough user base that I won't be completely on my own if I use it."

How is it useful to define success in that way?

It isn't, but you did not define 'success' either. You just listed a few large projects, but no explanation why do you call them 'successful'.

The grandparent was talking about looking at Sourceforge to avoid sifting through a bunch of hobby projects that aren't going anywhere.

Really? Actually the grandparent did not say much. He provided a link to the iweek article and asked for winners and losers among the SourceForge projects. I just think these attributes are not applicable for SouceForge projects. At least not with a proper definition what a winner and a loser is.

With your first post you seemed implicitly to say it is size. At least you only chose some of the largest projects.