You might be looking for this. It's referenced elsewhere in this discussion, so this is technically redundant, but I thought it'd be useful to have the link handy to this particular post.
Tim Perdue was one of the founding architects of SourceForge, the open source project management and website, hosting thousands of projects and home to over 500,000 developers. Tim is also known for having built both GeoCrawler and PHPBuilder. OSDir asks Tim about his days at SourceForge, what happened behind the scenes, and his latest project, GForge, a scaled down and enhanced version of Alexandria, the code that VA closed to sell as proprietary.
OSDir.com: The last time I'd seen your name pop up, previous to your new project, was as a head honcho at SourceForge.
Tim: Well, I was only "head honcho" briefly after Tony Guntharp had moved to engineering and before Pat McGovern was brought in as manager. The funny part was, no one told me I was "in charge", until I was doing a presentation to the board of directors and I was introduced as the manager.
Other than those few months, I was lead developer, which also didn't mean a whole lot, since most of the time there were no other developers, and certainly no road map or plan for how SourceForge would progress. I essentially just built out and developed things on an ad-hoc basis as I saw fit. Drew Streib was the other founding developer for the first 9 months or so and he did the same, and we loosely coordinated our activities and criticized each other's code.
OSDir.com: What was it like at the helm of what is one of the biggest open source projects in existence?
"There was no budget - the hardware was literally repo's and rejects from tech support. This was a major irritant later on, when you would hear at company meetings how such-and-such a manager had provided all the budget and support to make this happen."
Tim: It was certainly exciting to see how outrageously successful it had become, and to be in a small group that was building it out. It was all very ad hoc, very loose. It was a lot of fun for the first several months.
After that, there started to be some tension. Drew and Tony had very serious personal conflicts. We all had pretty strong personalities, bull-headed so to speak, and that raised tensions. At the same time as exponential growth was occurring, we didn't have support in terms of staff or budget. Actually we had less staff with the departure of Drew and Tony a few months after launch. So it was Uriah and I trying to keep this monster growing totally by ourselves. I guess Quentin had joined to handle support requests at that time. But it got really, really ugly for Uriah, as he tried to admin and keep all the shoddy hardware running 24x7 by himself. That was really shameful. We sent some seriously nasty messages to upper management, which went completely unanswered and ignored.
At the same time, most every manager in the company was trying to take credit and grab control. At company meetings you would hear how the whole thing was the idea of so-and-so and they supported it from the start. The reality of how SF started was very different, and the official vision for SF was also very different than what we wound up with. Probably only the founding team remembers know how SF really started and what the original management vision was.
OSDir.com: What was that original vision?
Tim: The real goal of SourceForge was to build a site aimed at IT managers. Believe it or not, that was the real goal. Nobody working there, except Uriah and Larry Augustin, knows that. Everyone else has been fired or quit.
"My main interest is turning this into a client that you can detach and take with you."
Around August of 1999, VA had received back a report on "name recognition" from dataquest or something, and no one knew who VA Linux was, and so no one would buy VA hardware. So SourceForge was going to be a site where every IT manager in the world would come and get information, statistics, surveys, ratings, all that sort of stuff, on open source software and see the VA logo. The hosting of projects was sort of an underpinning to that.
Anyway, the management wanted this whole thing built out by Comdex in November - 2 or 3 months away at that point. There was no way that could happen, so Tony went to bat with management and they agreed to split it into 2 phases. Phase I was project hosting, which we could slap together by Comdex, and Phase II was the IT manager stuff, by February LinuxWorld in 2000.
So the original gang of four was shut in a small private office in SunnyVale and we just started whipping up this system. There was no plan. We just winged it. If we thought of something cool, we slapped it together and that was it. There was no budget - the hardware was literally repo's and rejects from tech support. This was a major irritant later on, when you would hear at company meetings how such-and-such a manager had provided all the budget and support to make this happen.
Anyway, Phase I was such a hit that management never again mentioned Phase II after the Comdex launch.
Shortly after the launch, you started hearing about "Server51" from Andover, which we viewed as a direct ripoff of SourceForge. To counterattack that, we were told by management to release the SourceCode right away, even though it was obviously crap that was hard-coded to run on SF.net.
It was at this time that VA's latest strategy was to distance themselves from Linux - the lustre was fading on that buzzword. Now VA was an Open Source company. They gave MySQL a couple million to GPL their code, we gave away our code, and so did Slashdot. I really expected that the company was going to change its name to something around "open source", which was quickly becoming a better buzzword than Linux. It was really VA management that started the open sourcing of the code.
"...why shut off a valuable open source tool, when you aren't going to wind up with a viable business. And today, SourceForge Onsite has less revenue than your average gas station."
The concept of shrink-wrapped SourceForge software didn't come about until someone from IBM or HP casually mentioned that it would be cool to bring SourceForge inside their company to manage projects.
OSDir.com: How did you part (from SF)? Was it on good terms?
Tim: A little bit of background. As the rest of the company imploded, we had a lot of those people come over and all of a sudden they cast themselves as the "experts" on everything from building a great development platform to running the development process. And of course, I didn't know shit from shinola, which I always found rather amazing since I built much of what they were fighting over.
What ultimately caused me to leave was getting called on the carpet about a post I made in the alexandria-developer discussion forum. A lot of people were wondering why the CVS tree was unavailable, when was the tarball getting released, etc. And in response, one of the new managers posted a response to the forum which was... less than frank. Mind you, it was my name attached to the happenings around the SF code, and I think everyone in this community of users knew me by name, so I did not appreciate the handling of this. It would have been far better to simply be frank and open with what was going on.
Internally, we all knew the code was closing and the entire company was being reorganized around the proprietary code. Practically everyone I knew had just been fired, and what was left was all the managers that were desperately clawing for a seat on SourceForge as everything else just disappeared around them. I'd say this was far bleaker than a year earlier when Uriah and I were desperately trying to hold SourceForge together with duct tape and bailing wire, and I had had enough.
Anyway, they weren't able to sell any of the paid installations while the code was out there, but the management was maintaining a facade that the code was coming,and that's what they said on the message board. It was a lie. I found that intolerable and I posted a list of places that people could obtain the latest code (various forks on the internet, like debian-sf, sfportable, and sf-genericinst). Well, I got yelled at and I literally said 'Farewell' right there on the spot. The manager in question was headed out for a weeklong vacation and told me to think about it while he was gone, but I decided a few hours later. And that was it.
OSDir.com: How do you feel about the closing of the alexandria code base by VA and subsequent projects that built on the still open source, but older, versions?
Tim: I had mixed feelings. I certainly understood that VA was "tiptoeing in the graveyard" as the CIO, Steve Westmoreland, told me. They were pretty desperate for a strategy after the hardware business imploded, and they were convinced they could build a business around SourceForge as a shrink-wrapped product.
But at the same time, I didn't think it was a good idea to close it, mainly because I didn't believe they were going to have any success selling the proprietary product anyway. So why shut off a valuable open source tool, when you aren't going to wind up with a viable business. And today, SourceForge Onsite has less revenue than your average gas station.
OSDir.com: So now the "valuable open source tool" is back in action in the form of GForge. Tell us what GForge is about. How much is it philosophicallyand practicality motivated?
Tim: I agree philosophically with the Debian-SF team that this is a fundamentally valuable tool for organizing and streamlining development, whether it's open source, or whether it's internally at companies. That's why I'm working closely with Debian-SF to ensure that we share a common codebase as things move forward. If developers can crank out more and better code based on what we're doing, that's something we can be proud of.
At the time that I had left VA Linux, I was aware of downloaded/free copies of SouceForge running at the biggest of the big companies, from GE, Sony, IBM, Xerox, and Intel to others I can't remember anymore. IBM DeveloperWorks even runs part of their main website on old SF code, and so does the Free Software Foundation. So the open source code is having a huge impact. Someone really needed to pick it up, and after a year of trying to get others to take up the slack, I finally did it myself.
OSDir.com: Have you had people approach you at all to work on a new version of the SourceForge code?
Tim: Yes, and interestingly enough, many of them are old haunts of VA.
OSDir.com: Have they approached you about building a new SourceForge-like site?
Tim: Well, I'm not interested in putting up a generic project hosting site myself, but there's some serious interest out there in either doing that, or in funding a rewrite of the entire codebase so it is distributed. I've put some thought into how you could restructure this whole thing so it is sort of like gnutella or freenet.
That's a big rewrite, but I do know there are a couple people willing to throw some cash at that and more people willing to code it.
OSDir.com: What kind of improvements have you incorporated into GForge?
Tim: There's not a whole lot in GForge 3 that wasn't in 2.61, aside from a lot of cleaning up and removing hacks that made it harder to install. Part of the "Open Source Strategy" for a while, was that we would make SF really hard to install, to encourage people to buy the commercial product. As a result, it was a real ***** to install.
"A single machine is sufficient. There's not much load involved for a small number of people. You could probably run 1,000 or more people on a single machine given how scalable this thing is."
OSDir.com: Ouch. Well it certainly was, ahem, difficult to install. The previous version of OSDir.com used the code. Notice it's no longer the case.
Tim: The most obvious change to the user is going to be the tabbed theme. This is something I kept trying to do with the official SourceForge, but could never get buy-in on it. Jabber support is almost complete, foundries have been removed, and as I mentioned, it's a lot easier to install. Tons of extra code which was needed for the ultra-scalability of SF.net, is no longer necessary.
OSDir.com: Ah classic. Is this the "Perfection is achieved now when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing left to take away." thing?
Tim: Hehehe, well it is kind of funny that my first instinct was to tear out things that irritated me for a long time, like the foundries. But there is a lot that can/should be added, and a lot that still needs to be rewritten to make it "cleaner" and more maintainable.
OSDir.com: What kind of features do you see being added that may have been hampered previously by other concerns?
Tim: My main interest is turning this into a client that you can detach and take with you.
OSDir.com: How does that work?
Tim: Think of it more like CVS for bugs, tasks, etc. You can copy it to a local machine and check it back in if you made any changes.
This was something Drew and I first talked about 1-2 months after the original SF launch, and a lot of groundwork was laid in the codebase to do it. But it was never realistic given the difficulty in keeping the site running from day-to-day. There were also concerns at that time that you wouldn't be able to show any ad banners, etc, so you really wanted them to visit the web site.
GForge also needs a "real" project manager - the current task manager is pretty weak. The forthcoming project manager will be based on the tracker, sort of a superset of tracker functions with calendaring and resource management added in for kicks. So when a bug is submitted, or a patch, you can easily spin that into a task, and join lots of bugs together into a task in the project manager. It needs gantt and pert charting too.
OSDir.com: Do you think you'll be able to muster the same kind of developer support and enthusiasm for this product as there was for developing the code under the SourceForge brand? Realistically, would that be an enviable thing?
Tim: There is some hope that by having this out there, it applies pressure to VA to open their codebase again. If so, then everyone wins. Aside from that, I can see there is enough interest already to make good use of the code, and I have already received a ton of code back from the debian-sf crew.
OSDir.com: What has the debian-sf crew been able to contribute?
Tim: They have replaced most of the strings on the site using the internationalization support that we built into the code, but never really used. So they've got complete translations in English, French, Spanish and Korean. And of course, a really slick and easy installation process.
OSDir.com: You've indicated that GForge is at Version 3.0 Is it ready to roll for anyone who wanted to set it up right now and take on some projects?
Tim: Yes, although we're currently on the pre4 release. Pre5 will complete the jabber support in a couple of days, and the final release in a couple of weeks will roll in all of the debian-sf changes.
OSDir.com: How much hardware in involved in using GForge today for say 1-25 projects?
Tim: A single machine is sufficient. There's not much load involved for a small number of people. You could probably run 1,000 or more people on a single machine given how scalable this thing is.
OSDir.com: How many folks have deployed GForge to date?
Tim: I don't know that, but there have been about 1,000 downloads so far, and I've heard from a lot of people who have installed it successfully and were happy with how easy and fast it was to install compared to old versions.
OSDir.com: What kind of feedback are you hearing from your adoring fans regarding GForge?
Tim: People are excited. I'm particularly surprised how much energy there is among the ex-VA employee crowd. Tony Guntharp, who was the original manager of SF, is offering to pitch in some interesting stuff he has written. Michael Jennings is working on an RPM installer. We've got an internal corporate user offering to pitch in ClearCase and Synchronicity support. There's a lot going on. I'm pretty impressed.
OSDir.com: Is there anything else, Tim, that you'd like to add regarding GForge?
Tim: Only that if you have time and energy, we could use your help rewriting portions of the codebase. There are a handful of old, crusty sections which have never been "upgraded" over time, and that would be a huge help.
Other than that, if you need to manage multiple development projects, try out the code and see if it helps.
OSDir.com: One last question. What does the "G" in Gforge stand for?
Make that "Taz of derivative, unoriginal Warner Bros, Inc. fame..." and I'll agree. THe original was simply "the Tasmanian devil".
Taz is to the Tasmanian devil as Ariel is to The Little Mermaid. The former is mass market pablum for the kiddies; the latter is an old classic stolen by soulless copyright-extending corporations.
If there'd been no competition, you're absolutely correct that we'd have had better CPU designs, and overall performance would likely have been orders of magnitude below what it is now.
So, speed and feature size are as good as they're going to get, and they were easy to do. Now we can work on the hard stuff with the benefit of all the processor power we've got sitting around unused.
Don't optimize the hard stuff until you've optimized the easy stuff.
I have a different perspective...I don't care WHAT the motivation is, I care what the results are. Evil and dangerous (to use your term) are about the same, result-wise, and the behavior that engenders both is what I describe. As you note, the observable response to both is the same.
Ignore the plot and much of the dialog. Look at the world. There are few other films that build as good a world as the Mad Max films did. It's not a great movie, I'll grant that, but it's still great entertainment.
Re:this can't be good
on
New Mad Max Film
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Watch the first three movies. The world ages...so do the characters. I see no paradox in revisiting the world after another 5-10 years and find that Max looks 15 years older. Youth and beauty can never beat old age and treachery, you know.
A company doesn't have to be evil to screw you. Often, complacency is enough.
Your example of Verizon runs counter to this statement, though.
My definition of an evil entity is one who acts in its own interest at the cost of other people's interests. Selling is thus not inherently evil; both parties get something. Monopolistic practices, however, are evil - the monopoly prospers while everyone else loses money.
I call no BS. My sister-in-law had thyroid cancer. She was treated with radioactive iodine. Her children were not allowed to be in the same room with her and her husband was warned to limit his exposure.
There is an upper limit on the amount of radiation you can be exposed to "safely" within a year. I think it's entirely reasonable to suppose that some radiation treatments for cancer would result in a dose of radiation close to half the yearly "safe" amount.
Why should it be available for free download? Is it code? I don't think the Free SOFTWARE Foundation has any ideological interest in making content unrelated to code available for free of charge.
Note that they do want content to be unencumbered by license agreements, but there's no indication they think it should be gratis.
the validity of evolution is not based on belief" Precisely.
which came first, the tiny pink dragon or the drinking problem I have no need for the drinking problem. With Pinkie's help, I've learned to directly metabolize H2O and CO2 to make CH3CH2OH. One of the benefits of advanced Arcturan civilization. Naturally I require a constant intake of H2O to maintain fluidity, thus the bottle...
not believing in evolution doesn't make it less true.
Right. And not believing in the tiny pink dragon that lives on my left shoulder doesn't make it less true. (Did I mention it's invisible and keeps me up to date on current events among the star-dwelling plasma beings on Arcturus?)
Go study your epistemology and your metaphysics and THEN you can talk to me about what's true.
what the hell is the rate of speed? It's speed. Rate is a general term. "Of speed" specifies what you're talking about. Compare with "high rate of acceleraton" - the words "rate of" are redundant. Consider alsoe "bowl of ice cream", "bowl of cereal", "bowl of stew". I can eat each of these ("I'm going to eat a bowl of ice cream"), but it makes just as much sense if you leave off the words "bowl of".
So you download the software, you compile the source, and you do a bit-by-bit comparison. They're the same - you have now verified that the binaries are compiled from the source code you verified.
Or they're not the same - you now call and talk to their tech support and find out why they're trying to root you. You have your lawyer send them nastygrams. You do a write-up for slashdot about the experience.
A high price to pay? OK...start by putting a price on your time. Print the information that's otherwise available on the net. Now cut those pages to size and bind them together. The books that come with the $50 retail package are starting to look pretty inexpensive. =)
So if it's not their intention to stop time, why'd they write it into the agreement? Would you sign an agreement that allowed the other party to take possession of your house at any time and sell it? "Oh, we don't really intend to do that." OK, so why are you asking for it? And even if I trust you, if you get bought by someone else, guess what? THEY can sell my house.
I'm willing to believe that intentions are pure in this case, but the agreement needs to be edited slightly.
allow PGP to freeze the clock indefinitely by simply not responding Precisely. And what happens if they go out of business? This is one of the key things that many otherwise well-intentioned source code license agreements fail to recognize: the software may outlast the the company that created it. It would likely be problematic even if some other corporation bought the PGP vendor. It is not uncommon for someone to buy the ASSETS of an insolvent corporation, but the obligation to respond to queries about source code could would logically be considered a LIABILITY.
Anyway, I think they had good intentions with this clause but they've paid too much attention to their lawyers. Perhaps, if the clause as written turns out to be a problem, (good) hackers could merely post "I have some interesting information about the product, but I am legally prevented from disclosing it by Section X, Paragraph Y of the source code licensing agreement. Please encourage the PGP vendor to acknowledge my emails"
Almost, but not quite true. Digital cash needs to be administered and backed by a BANK. In the case of the USA, the bank (the Federal Reserve BANK) is controlled by the government, but this was not always the case; historically, private banks issued paper currency backed by gold.
For a more current analogy, consider Visa/Mastercard/etc. These are NOT backed by a government; no one guarantees to merchants that swiping a digital stripe on a card means that they will eventually get money. The BANKS guarantee this.
Anyway, I would agree that until a major national institution with the finance to back up digital cash decides to do so, it won't go anywhere.
Nice troll. Response from m-w.com to a search for "whindow": The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary. Looking up "window" on the web site and searching the page for "whin" finds nothing. Checking google finds nothing to show that "whindow" is an alternate spelling for "window" - while there are hits, they all appear to be either a non-English language or a typo.
Slashdot Mirror
You might be looking for this. It's referenced elsewhere in this discussion, so this is technically redundant, but I thought it'd be useful to have the link handy to this particular post.
Never turn your back on an enemy who is still alive...words to live by.
Tim Perdue was one of the founding architects of SourceForge, the open source project management and website, hosting thousands of projects and home to over 500,000 developers. Tim is also known for having built both GeoCrawler and PHPBuilder. OSDir asks Tim about his days at SourceForge, what happened behind the scenes, and his latest project, GForge, a scaled down and enhanced version of Alexandria, the code that VA closed to sell as proprietary.
OSDir.com: The last time I'd seen your name pop up, previous to your new project, was as a head honcho at SourceForge.
Tim: Well, I was only "head honcho" briefly after Tony Guntharp had moved to engineering and before Pat McGovern was brought in as manager. The funny part was, no one told me I was "in charge", until I was doing a presentation to the board of directors and I was introduced as the manager.
Other than those few months, I was lead developer, which also didn't mean a whole lot, since most of the time there were no other developers, and certainly no road map or plan for how SourceForge would progress. I essentially just built out and developed things on an ad-hoc basis as I saw fit. Drew Streib was the other founding developer for the first 9 months or so and he did the same, and we loosely coordinated our activities and criticized each other's code.
OSDir.com: What was it like at the helm of what is one of the biggest open source projects in existence?
"There was no budget - the hardware was literally repo's and rejects from tech support. This was a major irritant later on, when you would hear at company meetings how such-and-such a manager had provided all the budget and support to make this happen."
Tim: It was certainly exciting to see how outrageously successful it had become, and to be in a small group that was building it out. It was all very ad hoc, very loose. It was a lot of fun for the first several months.
After that, there started to be some tension. Drew and Tony had very serious personal conflicts. We all had pretty strong personalities, bull-headed so to speak, and that raised tensions. At the same time as exponential growth was occurring, we didn't have support in terms of staff or budget. Actually we had less staff with the departure of Drew and Tony a few months after launch. So it was Uriah and I trying to keep this monster growing totally by ourselves. I guess Quentin had joined to handle support requests at that time. But it got really, really ugly for Uriah, as he tried to admin and keep all the shoddy hardware running 24x7 by himself. That was really shameful. We sent some seriously nasty messages to upper management, which went completely unanswered and ignored.
At the same time, most every manager in the company was trying to take credit and grab control. At company meetings you would hear how the whole thing was the idea of so-and-so and they supported it from the start. The reality of how SF started was very different, and the official vision for SF was also very different than what we wound up with. Probably only the founding team remembers know how SF really started and what the original management vision was.
OSDir.com: What was that original vision?
Tim: The real goal of SourceForge was to build a site aimed at IT managers. Believe it or not, that was the real goal. Nobody working there, except Uriah and Larry Augustin, knows that. Everyone else has been fired or quit.
"My main interest is turning this into a client that you can detach and take with you."
Around August of 1999, VA had received back a report on "name recognition" from dataquest or something, and no one knew who VA Linux was, and so no one would buy VA hardware. So SourceForge was going to be a site where every IT manager in the world would come and get information, statistics, surveys, ratings, all that sort of stuff, on open source software and see the VA logo. The hosting of projects was sort of an underpinning to that.
Anyway, the management wanted this whole thing built out by Comdex in November - 2 or 3 months away at that point. There was no way that could happen, so Tony went to bat with management and they agreed to split it into 2 phases. Phase I was project hosting, which we could slap together by Comdex, and Phase II was the IT manager stuff, by February LinuxWorld in 2000.
So the original gang of four was shut in a small private office in SunnyVale and we just started whipping up this system. There was no plan. We just winged it. If we thought of something cool, we slapped it together and that was it. There was no budget - the hardware was literally repo's and rejects from tech support. This was a major irritant later on, when you would hear at company meetings how such-and-such a manager had provided all the budget and support to make this happen.
Anyway, Phase I was such a hit that management never again mentioned Phase II after the Comdex launch.
Shortly after the launch, you started hearing about "Server51" from Andover, which we viewed as a direct ripoff of SourceForge. To counterattack that, we were told by management to release the SourceCode right away, even though it was obviously crap that was hard-coded to run on SF.net.
It was at this time that VA's latest strategy was to distance themselves from Linux - the lustre was fading on that buzzword. Now VA was an Open Source company. They gave MySQL a couple million to GPL their code, we gave away our code, and so did Slashdot. I really expected that the company was going to change its name to something around "open source", which was quickly becoming a better buzzword than Linux. It was really VA management that started the open sourcing of the code.
"...why shut off a valuable open source tool, when you aren't going to wind up with a viable business. And today, SourceForge Onsite has less revenue than your average gas station."
The concept of shrink-wrapped SourceForge software didn't come about until someone from IBM or HP casually mentioned that it would be cool to bring SourceForge inside their company to manage projects.
OSDir.com: How did you part (from SF)? Was it on good terms?
Tim: A little bit of background. As the rest of the company imploded, we had a lot of those people come over and all of a sudden they cast themselves as the "experts" on everything from building a great development platform to running the development process. And of course, I didn't know shit from shinola, which I always found rather amazing since I built much of what they were fighting over.
What ultimately caused me to leave was getting called on the carpet about a post I made in the alexandria-developer discussion forum. A lot of people were wondering why the CVS tree was unavailable, when was the tarball getting released, etc. And in response, one of the new managers posted a response to the forum which was... less than frank. Mind you, it was my name attached to the happenings around the SF code, and I think everyone in this community of users knew me by name, so I did not appreciate the handling of this. It would have been far better to simply be frank and open with what was going on.
Internally, we all knew the code was closing and the entire company was being reorganized around the proprietary code. Practically everyone I knew had just been fired, and what was left was all the managers that were desperately clawing for a seat on SourceForge as everything else just disappeared around them. I'd say this was far bleaker than a year earlier when Uriah and I were desperately trying to hold SourceForge together with duct tape and bailing wire, and I had had enough.
Anyway, they weren't able to sell any of the paid installations while the code was out there, but the management was maintaining a facade that the code was coming,and that's what they said on the message board. It was a lie. I found that intolerable and I posted a list of places that people could obtain the latest code (various forks on the internet, like debian-sf, sfportable, and sf-genericinst). Well, I got yelled at and I literally said 'Farewell' right there on the spot. The manager in question was headed out for a weeklong vacation and told me to think about it while he was gone, but I decided a few hours later. And that was it.
OSDir.com: How do you feel about the closing of the alexandria code base by VA and subsequent projects that built on the still open source, but older, versions?
Tim: I had mixed feelings. I certainly understood that VA was "tiptoeing in the graveyard" as the CIO, Steve Westmoreland, told me. They were pretty desperate for a strategy after the hardware business imploded, and they were convinced they could build a business around SourceForge as a shrink-wrapped product.
But at the same time, I didn't think it was a good idea to close it, mainly because I didn't believe they were going to have any success selling the proprietary product anyway. So why shut off a valuable open source tool, when you aren't going to wind up with a viable business. And today, SourceForge Onsite has less revenue than your average gas station.
OSDir.com: So now the "valuable open source tool" is back in action in the form of GForge. Tell us what GForge is about. How much is it philosophicallyand practicality motivated?
Tim: I agree philosophically with the Debian-SF team that this is a fundamentally valuable tool for organizing and streamlining development, whether it's open source, or whether it's internally at companies. That's why I'm working closely with Debian-SF to ensure that we share a common codebase as things move forward. If developers can crank out more and better code based on what we're doing, that's something we can be proud of.
At the time that I had left VA Linux, I was aware of downloaded/free copies of SouceForge running at the biggest of the big companies, from GE, Sony, IBM, Xerox, and Intel to others I can't remember anymore. IBM DeveloperWorks even runs part of their main website on old SF code, and so does the Free Software Foundation. So the open source code is having a huge impact. Someone really needed to pick it up, and after a year of trying to get others to take up the slack, I finally did it myself.
OSDir.com: Have you had people approach you at all to work on a new version of the SourceForge code?
Tim: Yes, and interestingly enough, many of them are old haunts of VA.
OSDir.com: Have they approached you about building a new SourceForge-like site?
Tim: Well, I'm not interested in putting up a generic project hosting site myself, but there's some serious interest out there in either doing that, or in funding a rewrite of the entire codebase so it is distributed. I've put some thought into how you could restructure this whole thing so it is sort of like gnutella or freenet.
That's a big rewrite, but I do know there are a couple people willing to throw some cash at that and more people willing to code it.
OSDir.com: What kind of improvements have you incorporated into GForge?
Tim: There's not a whole lot in GForge 3 that wasn't in 2.61, aside from a lot of cleaning up and removing hacks that made it harder to install. Part of the "Open Source Strategy" for a while, was that we would make SF really hard to install, to encourage people to buy the commercial product. As a result, it was a real ***** to install.
"A single machine is sufficient. There's not much load involved for a small number of people. You could probably run 1,000 or more people on a single machine given how scalable this thing is."
OSDir.com: Ouch. Well it certainly was, ahem, difficult to install. The previous version of OSDir.com used the code. Notice it's no longer the case.
Tim: The most obvious change to the user is going to be the tabbed theme. This is something I kept trying to do with the official SourceForge, but could never get buy-in on it. Jabber support is almost complete, foundries have been removed, and as I mentioned, it's a lot easier to install. Tons of extra code which was needed for the ultra-scalability of SF.net, is no longer necessary.
OSDir.com: Ah classic. Is this the "Perfection is achieved now when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing left to take away." thing?
Tim: Hehehe, well it is kind of funny that my first instinct was to tear out things that irritated me for a long time, like the foundries. But there is a lot that can/should be added, and a lot that still needs to be rewritten to make it "cleaner" and more maintainable.
OSDir.com: What kind of features do you see being added that may have been hampered previously by other concerns?
Tim: My main interest is turning this into a client that you can detach and take with you.
OSDir.com: How does that work?
Tim: Think of it more like CVS for bugs, tasks, etc. You can copy it to a local machine and check it back in if you made any changes.
This was something Drew and I first talked about 1-2 months after the original SF launch, and a lot of groundwork was laid in the codebase to do it. But it was never realistic given the difficulty in keeping the site running from day-to-day. There were also concerns at that time that you wouldn't be able to show any ad banners, etc, so you really wanted them to visit the web site.
GForge also needs a "real" project manager - the current task manager is pretty weak. The forthcoming project manager will be based on the tracker, sort of a superset of tracker functions with calendaring and resource management added in for kicks. So when a bug is submitted, or a patch, you can easily spin that into a task, and join lots of bugs together into a task in the project manager. It needs gantt and pert charting too.
OSDir.com: Do you think you'll be able to muster the same kind of developer support and enthusiasm for this product as there was for developing the code under the SourceForge brand? Realistically, would that be an enviable thing?
Tim: There is some hope that by having this out there, it applies pressure to VA to open their codebase again. If so, then everyone wins. Aside from that, I can see there is enough interest already to make good use of the code, and I have already received a ton of code back from the debian-sf crew.
OSDir.com: What has the debian-sf crew been able to contribute?
Tim: They have replaced most of the strings on the site using the internationalization support that we built into the code, but never really used. So they've got complete translations in English, French, Spanish and Korean. And of course, a really slick and easy installation process.
OSDir.com: You've indicated that GForge is at Version 3.0 Is it ready to roll for anyone who wanted to set it up right now and take on some projects?
Tim: Yes, although we're currently on the pre4 release. Pre5 will complete the jabber support in a couple of days, and the final release in a couple of weeks will roll in all of the debian-sf changes.
OSDir.com: How much hardware in involved in using GForge today for say 1-25 projects?
Tim: A single machine is sufficient. There's not much load involved for a small number of people. You could probably run 1,000 or more people on a single machine given how scalable this thing is.
OSDir.com: How many folks have deployed GForge to date?
Tim: I don't know that, but there have been about 1,000 downloads so far, and I've heard from a lot of people who have installed it successfully and were happy with how easy and fast it was to install compared to old versions.
OSDir.com: What kind of feedback are you hearing from your adoring fans regarding GForge?
Tim: People are excited. I'm particularly surprised how much energy there is among the ex-VA employee crowd. Tony Guntharp, who was the original manager of SF, is offering to pitch in some interesting stuff he has written. Michael Jennings is working on an RPM installer. We've got an internal corporate user offering to pitch in ClearCase and Synchronicity support. There's a lot going on. I'm pretty impressed.
OSDir.com: Is there anything else, Tim, that you'd like to add regarding GForge?
Tim: Only that if you have time and energy, we could use your help rewriting portions of the codebase. There are a handful of old, crusty sections which have never been "upgraded" over time, and that would be a huge help.
Other than that, if you need to manage multiple development projects, try out the code and see if it helps.
OSDir.com: One last question. What does the "G" in Gforge stand for?
Tim: GNU I suppose.
Presumably the +10 bag would be to put over their heads?
Make that "Taz of derivative, unoriginal Warner Bros, Inc. fame..." and I'll agree. THe original was simply "the Tasmanian devil".
Taz is to the Tasmanian devil as Ariel is to The Little Mermaid. The former is mass market pablum for the kiddies; the latter is an old classic stolen by soulless copyright-extending corporations.
If there'd been no competition, you're absolutely correct that we'd have had better CPU designs, and overall performance would likely have been orders of magnitude below what it is now.
So, speed and feature size are as good as they're going to get, and they were easy to do. Now we can work on the hard stuff with the benefit of all the processor power we've got sitting around unused.
Don't optimize the hard stuff until you've optimized the easy stuff.
I have a different perspective...I don't care WHAT the motivation is, I care what the results are. Evil and dangerous (to use your term) are about the same, result-wise, and the behavior that engenders both is what I describe. As you note, the observable response to both is the same.
Ignore the plot and much of the dialog. Look at the world. There are few other films that build as good a world as the Mad Max films did. It's not a great movie, I'll grant that, but it's still great entertainment.
Watch the first three movies. The world ages...so do the characters. I see no paradox in revisiting the world after another 5-10 years and find that Max looks 15 years older. Youth and beauty can never beat old age and treachery, you know.
1. Imagine beowulf cluster of Soviet Russia.
2. ????
3. All your Portman are belong to grits!!!!!
A company doesn't have to be evil to screw you. Often, complacency is enough.
Your example of Verizon runs counter to this statement, though.
My definition of an evil entity is one who acts in its own interest at the cost of other people's interests. Selling is thus not inherently evil; both parties get something. Monopolistic practices, however, are evil - the monopoly prospers while everyone else loses money.
And there are many internets, but only one Internet.
Funny, though...there are many phone systems, but there is no Phone System. Or am I missing something?
I call no BS. My sister-in-law had thyroid cancer. She was treated with radioactive iodine. Her children were not allowed to be in the same room with her and her husband was warned to limit his exposure.
There is an upper limit on the amount of radiation you can be exposed to "safely" within a year. I think it's entirely reasonable to suppose that some radiation treatments for cancer would result in a dose of radiation close to half the yearly "safe" amount.
Why should it be available for free download? Is it code? I don't think the Free SOFTWARE Foundation has any ideological interest in making content unrelated to code available for free of charge.
Note that they do want content to be unencumbered by license agreements, but there's no indication they think it should be gratis.
the validity of evolution is not based on belief"
Precisely.
which came first, the tiny pink dragon or the drinking problem
I have no need for the drinking problem. With Pinkie's help, I've learned to directly metabolize H2O and CO2 to make CH3CH2OH. One of the benefits of advanced Arcturan civilization. Naturally I require a constant intake of H2O to maintain fluidity, thus the bottle...
Call them back and say "Fraud, civil lawsuit, treble damages" and see if you can't get some better response.
not believing in evolution doesn't make it less true.
Right. And not believing in the tiny pink dragon that lives on my left shoulder doesn't make it less true. (Did I mention it's invisible and keeps me up to date on current events among the star-dwelling plasma beings on Arcturus?)
Go study your epistemology and your metaphysics and THEN you can talk to me about what's true.
All you'd need to do would be to keep some liquid nitrogen handy...
what the hell is the rate of speed?
It's speed. Rate is a general term. "Of speed" specifies what you're talking about. Compare with "high rate of acceleraton" - the words "rate of" are redundant. Consider alsoe "bowl of ice cream", "bowl of cereal", "bowl of stew". I can eat each of these ("I'm going to eat a bowl of ice cream"), but it makes just as much sense if you leave off the words "bowl of".
So you download the software, you compile the source, and you do a bit-by-bit comparison. They're the same - you have now verified that the binaries are compiled from the source code you verified.
Or they're not the same - you now call and talk to their tech support and find out why they're trying to root you. You have your lawyer send them nastygrams. You do a write-up for slashdot about the experience.
Looks like a win-win scenario to me...
A high price to pay? OK...start by putting a price on your time. Print the information that's otherwise available on the net. Now cut those pages to size and bind them together. The books that come with the $50 retail package are starting to look pretty inexpensive. =)
So if it's not their intention to stop time, why'd they write it into the agreement? Would you sign an agreement that allowed the other party to take possession of your house at any time and sell it? "Oh, we don't really intend to do that." OK, so why are you asking for it? And even if I trust you, if you get bought by someone else, guess what? THEY can sell my house.
I'm willing to believe that intentions are pure in this case, but the agreement needs to be edited slightly.
allow PGP to freeze the clock indefinitely by simply not responding
Precisely. And what happens if they go out of business? This is one of the key things that many otherwise well-intentioned source code license agreements fail to recognize: the software may outlast the the company that created it. It would likely be problematic even if some other corporation bought the PGP vendor. It is not uncommon for someone to buy the ASSETS of an insolvent corporation, but the obligation to respond to queries about source code could would logically be considered a LIABILITY.
Anyway, I think they had good intentions with this clause but they've paid too much attention to their lawyers. Perhaps, if the clause as written turns out to be a problem, (good) hackers could merely post "I have some interesting information about the product, but I am legally prevented from disclosing it by Section X, Paragraph Y of the source code licensing agreement. Please encourage the PGP vendor to acknowledge my emails"
Almost, but not quite true. Digital cash needs to be administered and backed by a BANK. In the case of the USA, the bank (the Federal Reserve BANK) is controlled by the government, but this was not always the case; historically, private banks issued paper currency backed by gold.
For a more current analogy, consider Visa/Mastercard/etc. These are NOT backed by a government; no one guarantees to merchants that swiping a digital stripe on a card means that they will eventually get money. The BANKS guarantee this.
Anyway, I would agree that until a major national institution with the finance to back up digital cash decides to do so, it won't go anywhere.
Nice troll. Response from m-w.com to a search for "whindow": The word you've entered isn't in the dictionary. Looking up "window" on the web site and searching the page for "whin" finds nothing. Checking google finds nothing to show that "whindow" is an alternate spelling for "window" - while there are hits, they all appear to be either a non-English language or a typo.