I got my tux tattoo about 8 years ago, and had it touched up with the rest of these folks (actually, earlier on in the day because I had to MC the party.)
I think it's still as timely now as it was when I got it, and I think that if 30 years go by I'll always remember how important Linux was to me during this time in my life. If it weren't for my exposure to Linux, I probably wouldn't have become a sysadmin when I was a kid, I probably wouldn't have become a developer in my twenties, and I wouldn't be the community manager for SourceForge.net today. I hardly think that's a narrow focus.
It just so happens that the person in that picture is Aaron Fulkerson, the CEO of Mindtouch. It seems to me that he's probably not going to be fired or quit anytime soon.
I think that banning the entirety of SourceForge.net because they have an issue with statements made by one of our projects is like killing a fly with a garage door. The URLs at SF.net are not that hard to parse.
Clearly, the Notepad++ admins accept the risks of making the statement that they make, and they think it's worth it. Would the other 180,000 project admins make the same choice? Should the Chinese community really be denied access to all of the other projects? I guess all I'm saying is that *if* China is going to censor, perhaps they could be a bit more selective.
I know what you're thinking: "Doesn't that mean SourceForge.net should be more strict about removing political statements from project data to protect access for everyone in China?" Some people might think that's a reasonable thing to do. But what then? If, for example, Microsoft decides to make IE stop working with SourceForge.net because they find anti-Microsoft sentiment on the site, should we censor that, too? Not if I have anything to do with it...
(Disclaimer: I represent SourceForge.net, but this post is just my opinion.)
Not sure where you're getting that from. I went to the SourceForge Software Map and filtered out all Linux and POSIX projects and was still left with 64,207. That's almost half of the projects on SourceForge that don't run on Linux at all!
SourceForge.net is funded almost entirely by ads. That's what folks mean when they say it's part of the "media business". We're selling our audience (in the form of web site traffic) to advertisers.
So, contrary to your post, a focus on the media business actually means that more attention is being payed to SourceForge.net, not less.
Touche. I'd feel a whole lot weirder about submitting this to Slashdot, our sister site, if it didn't generate such a healthy discussion. It wasn't my intention to get applicants, it was my intention to figure out what this community thinks is compelling about this position as we've promoted it and what isn't. And, truthfully, I've gotten a lot of good feedback...so gee thanks, Slashdot-skateers!
Incidentally, since you asked: It's in the states. SourceForge.net is going to be implementing a new backend architecture to compliment our current LAMP stuff. OSS is becoming more commonplace in the IT industry, so we're preparing to launch a transaction-based service to help our community members generate revenue from their work.
Just like any company, we're not looking to pay more than we have to - that goes without saying. But we want good people, and we're willing to pay what good people cost.
The ad showed a clear and obvious example of the incompetence of the people posting the ad.
Two words "batchelor's degree."
As soon as an ad demands a degree it's a clear sign the people running the place do not know what they are doing. It means that all they know how to do is look at paperwork or credentials. Capability, ability and knowledge mean very little. All that matters is the paperwork.
Actually, I was the one who wrote that. Thanks for not mincing words.
A few musings, though. The first is that it does say "bachelors degree..or equivilent". Maybe my choice of wording was a bit ambiguous, but I don't think many people would question exactly what I find equivilent to a degree.
The second is that I, too, have been programming for a long time, and I do not have a degree. Looking back, if I had chosen to get a degree, I'd have entered the work force right when things were getting really bad. In retrospect, it was a good decision, even if it turns out that I have to go back and catch what I missed eventually. I gave some thought to this requirement, I stand by it, and I myself would fall under the "equivilent" part.
Places I have interviewed for that showed me they did know what they were doing never once specified level of education; instead they had people take a skills test.
We're having people do a fairly intensive technical interview, and the candidates we're most interested in get a take-home coding exercise. I think that's probably along the same lines as what you're suggesting.
What better reason can you think of to need superb staff? Our staff has more than tripled in the past two years, we've spent a fortune on hardware, and we're being more ambitious than we have been in the history of the site. But we need to grow so that we can be more stable, more reliable, and have higher quality features.
# shunned by many developers/groups
That may be true, although in my experience it's a bit overstated. There is both good will and bad will. I think there's far more good than bad, though. I can see this being a factor, but not nearly as much of a factor as, say, our location.
# solving a fundamentally uninteresting problem
Wow! What makes it uninteresting, in your opinion? SourceForge's goal is to incite participation in the OSS development process, and to reward those who make meaningful contribution. What could be more interesting than that? We certainly have the traffic to make a difference, that potential is very exciting to me.
Our PHP team is almost completely remote. In fact, just one of our architects is located in the Fremont office and everyone else is distributed. I think it works out very well, since everybody is comfortable communicating via Jabber/email/concall. I personally work from my home in Los Angeles, and travel to Fremont very often.
This project is a little bit different, though. This is a near-complete rearchitecture, and we figure that the team should be colocated..at least until it gets off the ground. It's going to be a brand new team, and we all need to figure out how to work with one another. We're cool with remote staff who are willing to spend a bunch of time in Fremont to kick off the project, and I think that widens the net considerably..
Perhaps I should refine what I mean by "superstar".
We just finished hiring for some PHP positions we had open, and we found three engineers that I consider to be "superstars". It's not because of their experience, necessarily, it's because they have great attitudes and awesome raw talent. They were great hires.
Perhaps our problem is that we're hiring for Java? Is it that Java is a language people learn for industry, not because they love it? Are we likely to find people who specialize in Java and are compelled by the idea of working on an OSS site? Is that part of what this is about?
If you want to be flooded with resumes from highly talented people, you need all four of the following: a big name, pay at or above the market rate, interesting projects to work on, and a strong and growing financial situation. If you are missing any of these things, you're going to have to work harder to get the really good people.
This is what's so confusing to me. I believe we have all of those things - SourceForge.net is a widely recognized name, we're willing to pay well, we're beginning a very compelling project (this isn't sustaining engineering), and we've just recently become profitable and have tons of cash. We're certainly not Google, but I think there are still a lot of compelling reasons to work here.
It's one thing to sit back and watch the Google IPO and subsequent success, the YouTube purchase, and the increasing traffic on 880/237...but to be directly affected like this has really made me think of how quickly the second dotcom boom is happening.
Hah! I was actually really surprised that they posted my submission. They don't pull favors for us ever, they must have thought it would cause an interesting discussion..
I'm certainly not saying that people should take a pay cut to work here just because we have name recognition and work in the OSS space.:) In fact, we're willing to pay very competitively.
There are projects on SourceForge.net that are in a holding, pending, or otherwise non-public state. We wanted to make sure that the namespace was also protected for projects that are not viewable.
Besides, this way we get greater data integrity. There's no great way to screen-scrape the entire project list. The Software Map only gets projects that have categorized themselves, and there's no "show all projects" feature since it would surely cause a PHP timeout.;)
We provided Google with a list of registered project names on SourceForge.net to allow future integration between the open-source repositories with minimized namespace conflicts.
The email you saw, if I am not mistaken, was generated when someone tried to create a project at Google with the same name as a SF.net project you belong to.
Unless I am very mistaken about Google's intentions (and I don't think I am), your email address was not picked in an automated way. It was a direct result of an action that was relevent to you, specifically. That may or may not make it seem any better to you, but I don't find it particularly nefarious. Rather, I think it's good that Google and SourceForge are working together to protect your interests..
I think we have come to the realization that SF.net needs a bit of an overhaul...frankly, almost all of our resources in the past five years have been put towards coping with a tremendous amount of growth. The site was never designed to scale like we've had to make it scale.:)
However, we've almost tripled our staff in the past year, and we've begun doing some more intensive architectural work and focusing on the user experience. Since we've started this project, the Software Map, Search, and a lot of our most used pages have been redesigned. But we can't unravel it all overnight - something I've learned working on this site is that it's a very different thing coding on a site that already has twenty-four million unique visitors a month.
Hang in there, and thanks for being outspoken. Ross
Yeah, for a developer-oriented site, we should be far more understanding of folks using wget.:) That, as well as some detection of the closest mirror, is part of what we've begun designing.
We just finished listening to Greg's presentation at OSCON, and so far we're feeling pretty good about what this means for the Open Source community, and, by extension, SourceForge.net. Because, after all, what's good for the community is good for us.
Greg talked a bit about how he expects that users will want to "mix and match" tools that are offered at Google Code, SourceForge.net, and other repositories. This resonates very well with us, and is consistent with our longer-term goals - flexibility is one of the cornerstones of our larger strategic direction. Developers should work using the tools they want to use.
We've got a pretty good relationship with the folks over at Google, and I really believe they're launching this because they, like us, care about Open Source and want to see it continue to thrive. We've begun disucssions about integration between SF.net and Google Code - you'll notice that you can't register projects on Google Code with SF.net project names. I expect there will be a much more substantial integration as the community makes its needs known.
Thanks,
Ross Turk (joined by Jay Seirmarco)
SourceForge.net Engineering Manager
We've been gathering input on the download system, well, pretty much since it was created. Personally, I find it painful, but there are a lot of reasons why it is the way it is today.
That said, a replacement for the download system is currently in planning, and our primary aim is to allow consumers to get what they're looking for with fewer clicks. Our current phases tend to be about 90 days, and we plan to enter implementation in August.
Slashdot Mirror
I got my tux tattoo about 8 years ago, and had it touched up with the rest of these folks (actually, earlier on in the day because I had to MC the party.)
I think it's still as timely now as it was when I got it, and I think that if 30 years go by I'll always remember how important Linux was to me during this time in my life. If it weren't for my exposure to Linux, I probably wouldn't have become a sysadmin when I was a kid, I probably wouldn't have become a developer in my twenties, and I wouldn't be the community manager for SourceForge.net today. I hardly think that's a narrow focus.
It just so happens that the person in that picture is Aaron Fulkerson, the CEO of Mindtouch. It seems to me that he's probably not going to be fired or quit anytime soon.
I think that banning the entirety of SourceForge.net because they have an issue with statements made by one of our projects is like killing a fly with a garage door. The URLs at SF.net are not that hard to parse.
Clearly, the Notepad++ admins accept the risks of making the statement that they make, and they think it's worth it. Would the other 180,000 project admins make the same choice? Should the Chinese community really be denied access to all of the other projects? I guess all I'm saying is that *if* China is going to censor, perhaps they could be a bit more selective.
I know what you're thinking: "Doesn't that mean SourceForge.net should be more strict about removing political statements from project data to protect access for everyone in China?" Some people might think that's a reasonable thing to do. But what then? If, for example, Microsoft decides to make IE stop working with SourceForge.net because they find anti-Microsoft sentiment on the site, should we censor that, too? Not if I have anything to do with it...
(Disclaimer: I represent SourceForge.net, but this post is just my opinion.)
Not sure where you're getting that from. I went to the SourceForge Software Map and filtered out all Linux and POSIX projects and was still left with 64,207. That's almost half of the projects on SourceForge that don't run on Linux at all!
Ross (SourceForge.net community guy)
SourceForge.net is funded almost entirely by ads. That's what folks mean when they say it's part of the "media business". We're selling our audience (in the form of web site traffic) to advertisers.
So, contrary to your post, a focus on the media business actually means that more attention is being payed to SourceForge.net, not less.
Thx,
Ross from SourceForge.net
Touche. I'd feel a whole lot weirder about submitting this to Slashdot, our sister site, if it didn't generate such a healthy discussion. It wasn't my intention to get applicants, it was my intention to figure out what this community thinks is compelling about this position as we've promoted it and what isn't. And, truthfully, I've gotten a lot of good feedback...so gee thanks, Slashdot-skateers!
Incidentally, since you asked: It's in the states. SourceForge.net is going to be implementing a new backend architecture to compliment our current LAMP stuff. OSS is becoming more commonplace in the IT industry, so we're preparing to launch a transaction-based service to help our community members generate revenue from their work.
Just like any company, we're not looking to pay more than we have to - that goes without saying. But we want good people, and we're willing to pay what good people cost.
Thanks,
Ross
Glad you feel that it was informative. At times, it looked like it was going to get brutal! :)
Ross
Actually, I was the one who wrote that. Thanks for not mincing words.
A few musings, though. The first is that it does say "bachelors degree..or equivilent". Maybe my choice of wording was a bit ambiguous, but I don't think many people would question exactly what I find equivilent to a degree.
The second is that I, too, have been programming for a long time, and I do not have a degree. Looking back, if I had chosen to get a degree, I'd have entered the work force right when things were getting really bad. In retrospect, it was a good decision, even if it turns out that I have to go back and catch what I missed eventually. I gave some thought to this requirement, I stand by it, and I myself would fall under the "equivilent" part.
We're having people do a fairly intensive technical interview, and the candidates we're most interested in get a take-home coding exercise. I think that's probably along the same lines as what you're suggesting.
Thanks for your comments!
RossOkay, I'll bite :)
What better reason can you think of to need superb staff? Our staff has more than tripled in the past two years, we've spent a fortune on hardware, and we're being more ambitious than we have been in the history of the site. But we need to grow so that we can be more stable, more reliable, and have higher quality features.
That may be true, although in my experience it's a bit overstated. There is both good will and bad will. I think there's far more good than bad, though. I can see this being a factor, but not nearly as much of a factor as, say, our location.
Wow! What makes it uninteresting, in your opinion? SourceForge's goal is to incite participation in the OSS development process, and to reward those who make meaningful contribution. What could be more interesting than that? We certainly have the traffic to make a difference, that potential is very exciting to me.
Thanks,Ross
Our PHP team is almost completely remote. In fact, just one of our architects is located in the Fremont office and everyone else is distributed. I think it works out very well, since everybody is comfortable communicating via Jabber/email/concall. I personally work from my home in Los Angeles, and travel to Fremont very often.
This project is a little bit different, though. This is a near-complete rearchitecture, and we figure that the team should be colocated..at least until it gets off the ground. It's going to be a brand new team, and we all need to figure out how to work with one another. We're cool with remote staff who are willing to spend a bunch of time in Fremont to kick off the project, and I think that widens the net considerably..
Ross
Heh! "Superstar" isn't in our job description! I'm not sure I'd want an engineer who responds to a description like that.
Ross
Good idea. We'll do that, and we'll talk more about why this is an interesting job.
Ross
Perhaps I should refine what I mean by "superstar".
We just finished hiring for some PHP positions we had open, and we found three engineers that I consider to be "superstars". It's not because of their experience, necessarily, it's because they have great attitudes and awesome raw talent. They were great hires.
Perhaps our problem is that we're hiring for Java? Is it that Java is a language people learn for industry, not because they love it? Are we likely to find people who specialize in Java and are compelled by the idea of working on an OSS site? Is that part of what this is about?
Ross
This is what's so confusing to me. I believe we have all of those things - SourceForge.net is a widely recognized name, we're willing to pay well, we're beginning a very compelling project (this isn't sustaining engineering), and we've just recently become profitable and have tons of cash. We're certainly not Google, but I think there are still a lot of compelling reasons to work here.
It's one thing to sit back and watch the Google IPO and subsequent success, the YouTube purchase, and the increasing traffic on 880/237...but to be directly affected like this has really made me think of how quickly the second dotcom boom is happening.
RossHah! I was actually really surprised that they posted my submission. They don't pull favors for us ever, they must have thought it would cause an interesting discussion..
RossWrong job posting. That's for the Enterprise Edition team. Ours is here.
RossI'm certainly not saying that people should take a pay cut to work here just because we have name recognition and work in the OSS space. :) In fact, we're willing to pay very competitively.
Ross
There are projects on SourceForge.net that are in a holding, pending, or otherwise non-public state. We wanted to make sure that the namespace was also protected for projects that are not viewable.
;)
Besides, this way we get greater data integrity. There's no great way to screen-scrape the entire project list. The Software Map only gets projects that have categorized themselves, and there's no "show all projects" feature since it would surely cause a PHP timeout.
Ross
Mukund:
We provided Google with a list of registered project names on SourceForge.net to allow future integration between the open-source repositories with minimized namespace conflicts.
The email you saw, if I am not mistaken, was generated when someone tried to create a project at Google with the same name as a SF.net project you belong to.
Unless I am very mistaken about Google's intentions (and I don't think I am), your email address was not picked in an automated way. It was a direct result of an action that was relevent to you, specifically. That may or may not make it seem any better to you, but I don't find it particularly nefarious. Rather, I think it's good that Google and SourceForge are working together to protect your interests..
Ross Turk
SourceForge.net
Hacker:
I was there in person. I do know that they were recorded, not sure if folks who didn't attend the show will be able to get a copy..
Ross
I think we have come to the realization that SF.net needs a bit of an overhaul...frankly, almost all of our resources in the past five years have been put towards coping with a tremendous amount of growth. The site was never designed to scale like we've had to make it scale. :)
However, we've almost tripled our staff in the past year, and we've begun doing some more intensive architectural work and focusing on the user experience. Since we've started this project, the Software Map, Search, and a lot of our most used pages have been redesigned. But we can't unravel it all overnight - something I've learned working on this site is that it's a very different thing coding on a site that already has twenty-four million unique visitors a month.
Hang in there, and thanks for being outspoken.
Ross
Mike:
:) That, as well as some detection of the closest mirror, is part of what we've begun designing.
Yeah, for a developer-oriented site, we should be far more understanding of folks using wget.
Thx,
Ross
We just finished listening to Greg's presentation at OSCON, and so far we're feeling pretty good about what this means for the Open Source community, and, by extension, SourceForge.net. Because, after all, what's good for the community is good for us. Greg talked a bit about how he expects that users will want to "mix and match" tools that are offered at Google Code, SourceForge.net, and other repositories. This resonates very well with us, and is consistent with our longer-term goals - flexibility is one of the cornerstones of our larger strategic direction. Developers should work using the tools they want to use. We've got a pretty good relationship with the folks over at Google, and I really believe they're launching this because they, like us, care about Open Source and want to see it continue to thrive. We've begun disucssions about integration between SF.net and Google Code - you'll notice that you can't register projects on Google Code with SF.net project names. I expect there will be a much more substantial integration as the community makes its needs known. Thanks, Ross Turk (joined by Jay Seirmarco) SourceForge.net Engineering Manager
We've been gathering input on the download system, well, pretty much since it was created. Personally, I find it painful, but there are a lot of reasons why it is the way it is today. That said, a replacement for the download system is currently in planning, and our primary aim is to allow consumers to get what they're looking for with fewer clicks. Our current phases tend to be about 90 days, and we plan to enter implementation in August.