Commercial Open Source Software

At SourceForge we just launched an online Women in Open Source Survey, based on the ubiquitous mentioned FLOSSPOLS survey. If you are wondering about what’s the state of art now you can help yourself and spend 5 minutes to fill the survey, we’ll share our findings as soon as possible.

Over the last months we’ve been analyzing SourceForge historical data, looking for trends and correlations. We’ve found factors that can help project administrators to get both more downloads and more visibility.

1. Project Icons
2. Screenshots
3. Project Title, blurb, and full description fields
4. Feature bullets
5. Accurate project categorization
6. More frequent releases, and flag latest release
7. Rapid turnaround on tickets

All things being equal, projects with these elements are more prone to capture people’s interest than projects without them.

A user visits a Project Summary Page either because they know exactly what they are looking for - in which case you don’t need to provide them with nuts and bolts - or because they are looking for something, and they don’t know if your project solves their problems. In this latter case, you have just a few moments to make a good first impression. Here’s a few tips to help you do just that.

1. “Put an alligator over the pocket” (W. Allen, With our Feathers - “The Scrolls” - 1975).When you put a logo on your project, people associate it with certain core values like trust, quality, reliability, experience, etc. If you don’t believe it, read Woody Allen’s “put an alligator” and learn how Lacoste eventually became famous!

Read the full article at SourceForge blog.

The Zentyal Summit 2011 will be held on the 11th and 12th of November in Zaragoza, Spain. The event offers a meeting place for the Zentyal Linux Small Business Server community. The Summit is the best place to join hands-on sessions, discuss the Zentyal roadmap, get certified or just meet up with the Zentyal team and the whole ecosystem of partners, customers and community members.

Many thanks to the Zentyal team and the sponsors to have invited me to keynote at this event.  In my talk “From Projects to Products” will take a look on how open source projects can turn in to commercially viable products and how SourceForge can help in the process.

Registrations are open, see you there!

About Zentyal: (formerly eBox Platform) is an open source unified network server software package (or a Unified Network Platform) for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Zentyal can act as a Gateway, Network Infrastructure Manager, Unified Threat Manager, Office Server, Unified communications Server or a combination of them. Besides, Zentyal includes a development framework to ease the development of new Unix based services.

SUSE Italia celebrates Linux 20th birthday on the 15th of November 2011 in Rome, and on the 17th of November in Milan. The event is aimed at unveiling SUSE Italia’s new structure and the distinguishing features of SUSE Linux.

The event is tailored to the interest of actual and potential partners.