Agylen

I've just added two new sections to Source.zone:

Conferences

This section lists conferences and seminars whose main theme is Open Source or have a significant number of sessions devoted to Open Source projects.

Companies and Consortiums

This section lists companies and consortiums whose business is primarily concerned with Open Source Software development, support, training and advocacy.

Please, feel free to add new entries, besides the handful I have already added.

Well, it didn't take much for spammers to find Source.zone and start filling it with useless drivel, did it?

At least, it was mildly annoying political drivel and not porn or gambling oriented.

I am considering disabling the sign-up feature, but at this point in time, I'm afraid I'd rather encourage people to post content then avoid spam. Fortunately, this time I only had to delete four pages, but if things start getting worse, I might be forced to take restrictive measures.

Quoting Craig Newmark:

A lot of people say that the internet is about technology. For me, itʼs about people, and
people connecting with each other in their day-to-day lives. In that way, the internet
hasnʼt changed at all since I started craigslist ten years ago. We help people to find each
other and we give them a voice, and somehow, people really do feel a sense of community
that they belong to.

This is exactly what I want to obtain with Source.zone: people (developers) connecting with each other in their day-to-day activity.

What will it take to get there? Well, among other things, mostly integrity:

Very important to me is the culture of trust that weʼve created and maintained on our
community since craigslist started. People are generally trustworthy, and I think in
this day in age thatʼs something to acknowledge and encourage. We do everything
in our power to foster this culture and the goodwill of people on the site, and weʼre
pretty obsessive about providing exceptional customer service.

So, in order to foster trust and in the interest of full disclosure, here are some ground rules:

1. Contributors will retain copyright over all the content they create, while granting Source.zone a non-exclusive license to publish it on the site.
2. I have already started putting Google and Amazon ads on some pages. This is intended to hopefully gather enough money to cover hosting and software costs. My own time won't be billed, but I wouldn't despise raising enough revenue to allow me to dedicate more time to it.

I've just enabled the Sign Up feature, provided by Confluence, in the Source.zone wiki. If you want, you can sign up and maybe start adding projects using the Add new project link.

This link allows you to create a new page, using a predefined template designed to capture essential information about open source software projects. Other than that, it's just a wiki, so feel free to add content as you like.

In any case, I reserve myself the right to delete any content I don't deem fit for the site's purpose.

I've spent some time in the last few days evaluating the two products that look more promising as a platform for the Source.zone initiative: Jotspot and Confluence.

First of all, let me say that both are cool products, made by very cool companies. And now for some comparisons.

Jotspot has some features, like forms, that could be useful. Plus, it's a hosted service, which should translate to lower activation costs, whereas Confluence is $1200 plus hosting.

On the other hand, being hosted has its disadvantages. With Confluence, I can do pretty much everything I want, on my own server, even modify it, since it comes with source code. With Jotspot, I have considerably less freedom. Moreover, Jotspot is still in beta, whereas Confluence is already at version 1.3.

All things considered, Confluence seems to have the edge, at the moment, mainly because with it I can already publish a website visible to the public, a thing that is currently not possible with Jotspot. I can also customize it much more easily.

While I'm at it, I will briefly mention XWiki, that was brought to my attention by Ludovic Dubost. From the set of its features, it looks interesting, and it's Open Source, which is not bad. I should find the time to test it too.