Ugo Cei’s Weblog
Excuse the cheap word game abusing the title of a classic 70's album, but I just came upon the Description of a Project — DOAP specification (via Steve).
Could be a useful addition to Source.zone, couldn't it? Well, before I start implementing something, I'd like to know if the thing is alive and kicking,in other words actually used by someone. For a start, I subscribed to the mailing list to investigate.
Thanks to Jim Jagielski for his contributions to Source.zone.
Thanks also to Sylvain Wallez for a small typo fixing … well, not so small for him since I mistyped the name of his company ;).
Now, this prompts me to ask for advice. Should we stroke the egos of frequent Source.zone contributors (hoping there will be more than one) by allowing them to put up a small bio page?
I've just added two new sections to Source.zone:
Please, feel free to add new entries, besides the handful I have already added.
Thanks to Davanum for his Source.zone page on Apache Axis. Keep up the good work, folks!
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:
Thanks to Anton Tagunov, we
now have the first external contribution to Source.zone.
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.
I’m uncomfortable, though, with a site aiming to be a reference for Open Source projects yet probably running on non-OpenSource software: isn’t there enough dogfood available?
Well, for one thing, Jotspot seems to have a range of features (think of structured data) that other wikis lack.
Second, my time is limited and I very much value having an hosted service that is ready to use. This is why I simply started by writing a review on this blog. I don’t want to start a new software development project and be dragged down by bike-shed type of arguments.
Third, I think having open data is more important than having open source, for this kind of endeavour.
In any case, nothing has been set in stone. I’m just going to take Jotspot for a ride for a couple of weeks and see whether it fits the bill or not.
I’ve just registered and activated a new domain for the Source.zone initiative: sourcezone.info. I’ve put there a temporary home page while I’m waiting for the activation of a beta Jotspot account in order to start creating and organizing content and services.
As you can see, I’m dead serious about this stuff and would like to renew my call for contributions. What we badly need to start is content, essentially reviews of Open Source projects.
I just started to think about building something to support Source.zone. There are basically two options: build or buy?
Should I decide to build, I could hack together quickly a webapp using my power trio (Cocoon, Spring and Hibernate), but then I'd have to maintain it in my spare time, and I would need to find some (cheap) hosting provider with the necessary support.
On the “buy” side, I currently see two candidates:
For a start, I've requested a beta account on Jotspot. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment.
the most. Those are the Open Source projects most people know because they have
a high visibility and receive widespread publicity.
But there are thousands and thousands of Open Source projects on the tail end.
– Matthew Langham, The
.
Long Tail of Open Source
If you are a developer looking for an Open Source library, framework or toolkit which
might help you with your current project, there is probably something out there that
fits your needs, if only you could find it.
Sure, there are some places like Freshmeat or SourceForge, that list a large
number of products. The problem is that sometimes it’s hard to separate the
wheat from the chaff, to see which projects are alive rather than dormant
or dead; which ones have a diverse, thriving community behind and which ones are
basically one-man-jobs; which ones grew from real needs and which ones are simply
abandonware products that some company decided to opensource rather than
bury at the end of their lives.
The problem is that it’s currently hard to find the correct project that suits
your needs. But really that’s only because someone hasn’t come up with the Amazon
type storefront and built that in front of the repositories, so you can search and
find the project you may need. And even if the project is run by someone on a
remote island on his own - who cares - it might be exactly what you were looking
for to build that particular solution someone really needs.
Source.zone’s aim is to create a storefront for access to
Open Source projects. The storefront will have the same level of participation
that users give back to Amazon or iTunes by providing their personal feedback
in form of reviews, ratings, comments, developers who liked this project
.
also liked this other one
Initially, Source.zone will just be a category on this weblog, where I will post some reviews of the projects I know and like better. In the meantime, I will either develop some collaboration code or see if we can use an existing solution (Confluence comes to mind).
If you want to contribute, please leave a comment here or drop me a note.
I think Matthew hits the nail on the head here:
A first step - when applying this to Open Source would be to create a similar storefront for the access to Open Source projects. Sourceforge is already part of that storefront, but it doesn't include any of the projects under the Apache umbrella or in the other Open Source repositories. The unified “storefront” would also need to have the same level of participation that users give back to Amazon or iTunes by providing their personal feedback in form of wishlists, comments, playlists etc. “Readers who bought this book also bought that book”.
I was thinking about this (having been inspired by Matthew's previous post on the same subject) while biking to and from home at lunch break. The thoughts I was having resonate very closely with Matthew's. What SourceForge and Freshmeat are lacking is much of the social, community aspects that make Amazon so effective: reviews, ratings and lists, indeed. Well, they have some of that, but it's underutilized.
SourceForge's aim, of course, is not to be a comprehensive catalog of Open Source Software, but Freshmeat's is. My problem with Freshmeat is that it has a very wide but shallow coverage. Too wide for my tastes, actually. I am a developer and I'm looking for developer tools, particularly for Java, but if I go to Freshmeat looking for reviews and comments about Cocoon, Spring or Hibernate I can find almost none, even though they are very popular projects. Nothing there can help me decide whether they can be good for my business.
I'm starting to think that it does not take much to start doing something to remedy this situation. We might develop a web application and call it Sourcezon.com, the Amazon.com of Open Source. It will, at least initially, be targeted at the main users of OSS, that is other developers. No kids looking for the latest P2P app that will enable them to exchange Britney Spears videos ;). Here is a preliminary list of features and peculiar characteristics:
What could be the business model of this service? Maybe it could be supported by ads. Or it might be sponsored by companies that want to promote their OSS projects. There are plenty of those at the moment.
OK, enough food fot thought already, I have a daytime job to take care of, now :(.
